If you financed a car, truck, RV, boat, or motorcycle at a dealership and something odd showed up in your mail or inbox this summer from a company called 700Credit, that was not junk. It was a notice that your name, address, birth date, and Social Security number had been sitting in a system somebody broke into.
There’s $50 waiting for you, up to $2,500 if the breach actually cost you money, and two years of credit monitoring on top. The claim window closes September 22. That’s eleven days.
700Credit is the company that runs the credit check while the salesperson takes your license and disappears into the back office for twenty minutes. Its 700Dealer.com application serves auto, RV, boat, and motorcycle dealers. You never picked it. You never signed anything with it. You handed your Social Security number to a person at a desk and it went there.
Around October 25, 2025, someone got in using stolen credentials. About 5.8 million people had their information exposed. Names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers. The full set, which is everything you need to open an account in somebody else’s name.
The notices went out in July and August 2026. Do the arithmetic on that. Nine months between the break-in and the postcard.
700Credit agreed to a $17.5 million settlement in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, with a final approval hearing set for October 7.
Here’s what they don’t tell you. That $17.5 million split across 5.8 million people is about three dollars a head before lawyers and administration come out of it. The $50 payment is written as an estimate “subject to adjustment based on claims volume,” which is settlement language for: this shrinks if a lot of you show up. The math only works for them because most people throw away the postcard.
Five minutes of your time for something in the neighborhood of $50 is a better rate than almost anything else you’ll do this week. Real money, and nobody is going to mail it to you.
Do this now. Go to 700creditdatabreachsettlement.com and file before September 22. You’ll want the notice ID from the email or postcard, and the site has a lookup if you tossed it.
Then freeze your credit at all three bureaus. It’s free, it takes about fifteen minutes, and a Social Security number that leaked in October 2025 does not expire the way a stolen credit card number does. A freeze is the only thing that stops a new account from being opened in your name, and it costs you nothing to lift when you need it. If you want to see where your file stands first, our credit score tool walks through what lenders actually see.
One more detail worth knowing. The deadline to opt out or object already passed, on September 8. Your only two choices now are file or get nothing, and doing nothing still binds you to the settlement. You give up the right to sue over this breach either way. Take the money.
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