A 15.5 GB file containing 7.3 million Chess.com user records appeared on data-leak forums this week with no cost or ransom demand. Ransomnews's technical analysis confirms the data is genuine and recent, but evidence points to large-scale scraping rather than a server breach. The archive contains 7,337,395 records with 38 fields including email addresses, usernames, real names, countries, chess ratings, subscription tiers, and internal Google Ad Manager audience tags not exposed via chess.com's public API.

No passwords or payment data were found. Researchers verified authenticity by decoding UUID timestamps across 200,000 records, achieving 100% match rate with account registration dates. The data was collected over nine consecutive days in daily batches, with 7.4% of records appearing twice—a pattern indicating automated collection rather than database extraction.

This mirrors a 2023 incident where chess.com confirmed 828,000 records were stolen through abuse of the find-friends feature, not a breach. The company stated, 'Our infrastructure, member accounts, and data such as passwords are secure.'.