In what feels like a lifetime ago at this point (2017), one of the three major credit bureaus in the United States, Equifax, experienced a massive data breach that impacted millions of consumers. A couple of years later, a class action lawsuit resulted in compensation payouts for thsoe that claimed them. Of course, with so many people impacted, these payouts weren’t too exciting when all was said and done. But now, it seems that settlement is resulting in additional payments to some claimants due to leftover funds — but, again, we’re not talking about a ton of money here.
I found out about these new rounds of payments while reading Doctor of Credit. Although I hadn’t recalled seeing such a notification, I decided to do a quick search of my inbox in case. Sure enough, doing a search of my inbox, I found an email — but it said that I’d get a follow-up the week of November 4th. With search producing no such message, I headed to my trash folder to find I had deleted it! Luckily, despite this, I was still able to generate my virtual card and claim my $8.91.
I should note that, in order to do this, I did need to provide some personal information including my address and phone number. For a second, I was hesitant to give this up just in case… but then I remembered that the whole reason I got these few dollars is that Equifax let all of our info leak to the world — so what’s one more person knowing going to do?
Anyway, since $8.91 is a very specific total and I didn’t want to deal with trying to use the card toward a larger purchase, I decided to head to Amazon for a gift card. There, I was able to reload for $8.91, add my virtual card info, and complete the transaction without issue.
Following this experience, I realized that my wife had also originally received a few dollars from the settlement so I implored her to check her email as well. To her surprise, she too had overlooked the message but had been sent some money. Interestingly, her payout was a penny more than mine, totaling $8.92. After she generated her card, we followed the same steps and added that sum to our Amazon account balance.
For what it’s worth, while $8.91 isn’t much, I looked back and found that it’s actually more than my initial payment of just $6.97. Combined, that’s $15.88 — or about 12.7% of the $125 originally teased.
Snark aside, the point of this post is to let you know to check your inbox, trash folder, or whatever else to see if you happened to get an email about this pro-rata payment. If you do, hopefully you can enjoy a cheeseburger, a beer, or whatever else you can purchase for less than $9 on Equifax’s dime.