Steel Warehouse Company - Data Breach Class Action Settlement

Data Breach · Claims Open

Current Status

Claims are open. Claim Forms must be submitted online by December 1, 2026, or mailed with a postmark no later than that date; the notice states a date rather than a cutoff time. The deadline to opt out or to object is much earlier, on October 2, 2026, and the final approval hearing is scheduled for October 21, 2026 at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time in South Bend, Indiana — so the court has not yet decided whether to approve the settlement, and no payment date had been announced as of August 30, 2026. If Steel Warehouse sent you a notice with a LoginID and PIN on it, the action to take now is to file a Claim Form: nothing here is automatic, and a class member who does nothing receives no cash and no credit monitoring.

What Changed Recently?

Notice has gone out to the class and the claim window is now running toward its December 1, 2026 close. The case is captioned In re: Steel Warehouse Data Incident Litigation, Cause No. 71D04-2508-CE-000011, in the Indiana Commercial Court in the St. Joseph County Superior Court. It began as two separate class action complaints filed in May 2025 against Steel Warehouse Company, LLC over the same incident; the court consolidated them in July 2025, and a consolidated complaint followed in August 2025.

According to the court-authorized notice, the lawsuit alleges that during a targeted cyberattack on Steel Warehouse's computer systems in January 2025, certain files containing private information were accessed. The notice says those files may have contained names, Social Security numbers, addresses, driver's license numbers, government-issued ID numbers such as passports, dates of birth, and financial information such as credit and debit card numbers. The settlement agreement dates the incident to on or around January 23, 2025.

The consolidated complaint pleaded negligence and negligence per se, breach of implied contract, breach of bailment, and invasion of privacy. Steel Warehouse answered by denying that it failed to employ adequate data security measures and denying all liability. After discovery, the parties mediated for a full day in March 2026 without reaching a deal, and reached an agreement in principle in April 2026 through the mediator's continued efforts. Steel Warehouse continues to deny any wrongdoing, and the court has not decided who is right.

Who Qualifies?

The court defined the class as all individuals whose personal identifying information may have been compromised as a result of the Data Incident, as identified on the Class List. That last clause is the operative one: Steel Warehouse gave the administrator a list of affected people, and membership is decided by being on it rather than by anything a claimant can assert. The notice tells recipients directly that Steel Warehouse's records indicate they are class members, and adds that some may have already received a separate notification from the company itself.

Excluded are Steel Warehouse and its officers, directors and related companies; the judge in the case along with the judge's family and staff; anyone who perpetrated the incident; and anyone who validly excludes themselves from the settlement. If you are unsure whether you are on the list, the official settlement website's contact page is the place to ask.

The settlement does not describe the class in employment terms, and the notice does not say how many people are on the Class List. The preliminary approval order says only that there are thousands of class members.

How Much Can You Get?

There is no common settlement fund here. Steel Warehouse pays valid claims directly, and the agreement caps the benefits per claimant rather than in aggregate — it states no total fund, no class-wide ceiling and no pro rata reduction. The costs of notice and administration, the attorneys' fees and the service awards are all paid by Steel Warehouse separately, on top of what class members receive.