Swatted.howData provenance / Sources & rules
How we get our data
The index behind every search is compiled from a handful of routes: public breach corpora, open sources, licensed and purchased data sets, and contributions from people who trade or give data away. This page says what each route means, what we require before we accept anything, and what we refuse outright.
Last updated 29 September 2026
Public breach corpora
Leaked and breached credential collections that circulate openly or are sold in the open. Every file is imported under its own source name, so each record in your results carries the label it arrived with.
Age and completeness vary by file.
Open sources
Material that is publicly visible: paste sites, public profiles, breach-monitoring output and public records. Nothing is taken from behind a login, a private account or a system we have no right to touch.
Publicly published, not extracted.
Licensed and purchased
Data sets bought from brokers, researchers and other operators under a sale or licence we can point back to afterwards. Purchases are recorded like every other import.
Paid for, with a paper trail.
Route 4 / We buy and trade
Paying for data
If you hold a data set you can sell or trade, you describe it to us: how you obtained it, when, how many lines and fields it holds, how many other people already have it, and what you want in return — money, higher usage on swatted.how, or data of ours.
Nothing is bought automatically. A person reads the offer, asks questions in a private channel, and either counters or approves. Only after that do we take delivery and run the file through our import pipeline, where it gets its own source label like any other file.
Route 5 / Free donations
Contributions
People give data away more often than they sell it — a paste they saved, an old dump they never used, a collection they maintain for research. Donations are welcome and cost nothing to send.
Contributions are held to exactly the same source rules as paid data, and they are imported under a source name you can point at, so the material you contributed stays attributable.
The other side of the ledger
What we don't accept
- Material obtained by extortion, fraud, or unauthorised access to someone's account or system.
- Anything whose provenance you cannot describe — if you can't say where it came from, we can't use it.
- Material assembled to harass or target private individuals.
- Data we have no lawful basis to process, including special-category data.
- Files we cannot safely inspect. Nothing we receive is ever executed.
Sending an offer never obliges us to buy, and we may decline any source without explaining why. If you were the person a record is about, you don't need to buy anything back: request removal instead — it's free.
Disclaimer
This page describes our practice in plain language; it is not legal advice and not a warranty about any individual record. Records vary in age and completeness, results can be out of date or partial, and everything you find should be treated as a lead to verify rather than proof.
We rely on the lawfulness of what contributors tell us, and we record the provenance of each import so a claim can be checked later. For how we handle personal data generally, see the privacy policy, terms and acceptable use policy.
Swatted is for looking up your own exposure or other lawful, authorized reasons only.
Sitting on something we should see?
Sell it, trade for it, or give it away. One form, a private review, and a reference you can follow.
Send us data