Jerico Pictures, the company operating National Public Data, filed for bankruptcy in late 2024 amid class actions and regulatory attention. The service stopped.
The published data did not stop. It is indexed, mirrored and freely available, and nothing about the dissolution of the company reaches any copy of it.
This Is What Accountability Looks Like When It Arrives
A company that lost control of records about a hundred million-plus people ceased to exist. That is, in a narrow sense, the market working: the business was destroyed by the consequences of its failure.
It delivered nothing to anybody in the file. There is no remediation, no correction, no compensation and now no defendant with assets. The corpus has recorded thin outcomes for affected people before; this is the case where the outcome is structurally zero.
The Consent Problem Has No Remedy Either
Nobody in this dataset provided their information to National Public Data. It was assembled by scraping sources they were not told about, per the analysis at 24-0812, from origins that can no longer be traced.
A regime built on notifying data subjects and offering them monitoring assumes a relationship that can be repaired. Where the relationship never existed, the notification is the first contact and the bankruptcy is the last.
And The Sector Is Not One Company
Background-check and people-search brokers assemble similar files from similar sources. The same records, or records substantially like them, sit with competitors that did not fail.
This desk has no figure for how many such holders exist or what they hold, and has seen none published. That absence is the finding: the exposure is distributed across an industry whose size is not publicly known.
Compiled from contemporaneous reporting of the bankruptcy filing and the litigation, listed below. This desk has not reviewed the filings. The characterisation of the broker sector is general and no figure for its size is asserted, because none has been seen. Graded medium. Corrections: corrections@forensicpost.com.
- National Public Data files for bankruptcy following massive data breachConcho Valley Homepage
- National Public Data breach: what happened, impact, and lessonsHuntress
- National Public Data breach: what you need to knowMicrosoft Support