Brady Dale reports;
t looks like hackers quietly siphoned data from Patreon, the site for financing creative people’s work via the crowd, for a very long time. That said, more than half the user emails found in the hack bear the markings that suggest they were likely fake accounts.
Read more on Observer. Note that the suggestion/hypothesis that much of the data dump is fake came from an anonymous source, but Observer ran the message by Troy Hunt for his comments. Here’s an example of what the anonymous source conveyed to Observer:
A lot of the leaked accounts appear to be fake: Of the 2,275,681 users our source said were shown in the hack, he or she wrote that 1,187,259 users were created between August 21 and 24, by accounts using Yahoo, Hotmail and other services with random strings for the beginning of addresses and for first names, with no last names.