A Company You've Never Heard Of Leaked 5.8 Million Car Buyers' Social Security Numbers. Now It Owes $17.5 Million.

When a dealership 'runs your credit,' odds are it does not do that itself. 700Credit, LLC provides credit reports and identity-verification for roughly 18,000 auto, marine, powersports, and RV dealerships — which is how the personal data of millions of buyers flowed through a company whose name appears on no showroom, no contract, and no window sticker.

In October 2025, 700Credit detected intruders in its dealer platform. The forensic result, filed with state attorneys general: records of 5,836,521 people were copied — names, addresses, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers.

Notification letters went out from December 2025 — from a company recipients had never done business with, offering free credit monitoring. It is exactly the format consumers are trained to distrust. Michigan's Attorney General issued a consumer alert; Maine's filing pinned down the exact victim count.

Now there is money attached: a $17.5 million settlement won preliminary approval on June 4, 2026, and the official claims site — 700CreditDataBreachSettlement.com — went live in late July. Class members can claim up to $2,500 for documented fraud losses, or a flat cash payment (currently estimated around $50), plus two years of free credit monitoring either way.

Claims must be submitted online or postmarked by September 22, 2026. The final approval hearing follows on October 7 in Detroit. Because SSNs were in the stolen files, the practical advice stands regardless of the settlement: a free credit freeze at all three bureaus blocks new-account fraud and costs nothing.