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On January 16, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that the FBI had seized the WeLeakInfo.com domain under a warrant issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The action put that domain in federal custody and effectively suspended the site’s operation; it did not establish that every copy of the information the site indexed had been erased.
What WeLeakInfo.com offered, according to DOJ
In its January 16, 2020 announcement, DOJ said the site claimed to operate a searchable database of personal information from more than 10,000 data breaches, with more than 12 billion indexed records. Those figures describe the website’s claims as reported by DOJ, not independently audited totals. The release did not provide a method for verifying them.
DOJ said users could buy subscriptions that allowed unlimited searches for one day, one week, one month, or three months. The site therefore presented itself as a paid search service for information assembled from breached databases.
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The seizure warrant transferred control of weleakinfo.com to the U.S. government. DOJ said the move effectively suspended the website’s operation at that domain. The warrant was issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia; the investigation involved the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, DOJ’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, and law-enforcement partners in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Northern Ireland.
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What it did not establish
- It did not show that all data the site had indexed was deleted from every source or copy.
- It did not establish that information previously downloaded or copied by others was recovered.
- It did not establish that the figures advertised by the site were independently verified.
A domain seizure can interrupt access through the seized web address. It is not, by itself, proof that information is no longer circulating elsewhere.
How the 2022 action differed
On May 31, 2022, DOJ announced a separate seizure involving WeLeakInfo.to, ipstress.in, and ovh-booter.com. DOJ described WeLeakInfo.to as providing access to stolen personal information and the other two domains as offering distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The department reported that the .to site claimed to index seven billion records; as with the 2020 figures, the release did not supply an independent validation method.
| Date | Domains seized | Activity DOJ attributed to the sites | Warranting court and partners described |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 16, 2020 | weleakinfo.com | Search service for personal information from data breaches | U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia; FBI, DOJ components, and partners in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, and Northern Ireland |
| May 31, 2022 | WeLeakInfo.to, ipstress.in, ovh-booter.com | Access to stolen personal information (.to); DDoS attacks (.in and .com) | The release describes an international investigation involving Dutch and Belgian authorities, an arrest, searches, and seizures of server infrastructure; it does not name a warranting court in the cited account |
The later announcement is a distinct enforcement action, not a continuation of the January 2020 .com seizure. It also should not be confused with the separate xDedic case, which concerned a marketplace for compromised computer credentials rather than WeLeakInfo.
What DOJ asked the public to do
The 2020 release asked people with information about WeLeakInfo.com or its owners and operators to contact the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center and include #weleakinfo in the description. That was a request for information relevant to the investigation, not an instruction that every reader report themselves simply for reading about the case.
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