Remember when hackers breached Equifax and grabbed the data of millions in 2016? Well, now they're paying up in the form of $125 cash payments for anyone impacted by the breach.
Go to the Equifax settlement site and check to see if you were one of the unlucky ones impacted by the breach. Although odds are, you already know you were because you probably had the misfortune to have a card hacked or your identity stolen.
There's another reason, too. These corporations agree to settlements like this betting that people won't bother to file the claim, figuring people will forget, not hear about it, or ignore it. As a consequence, they get off cheap. Don't let them do that. As Josephine Wolff at Slate writes, we have a moral obligation to make the claims and force them to pay.
In this settlement agreement, $125 covers the cost of free credit monitoring for a year. Since most folks aren't going to trust the company that caused the breach to monitor the breach, just get the check.
You may be eligible for reimbursement up to $20,000, too. Under the settlement agreement, you will be reimbursed for the following:
- the time you spent remedying fraud, identity theft, or other misuse of your personal information caused by the data breach, or purchasing credit monitoring or freezing credit reports, up to 20 total hours at $25 per hour.
- out-of-pocket losses resulting from the data breach.
- up to 25% of the cost of Equifax credit or identity monitoring products you paid for in the year before the data breach announcement.
And finally, if your identity was stolen, Equifax is obligated to provide free identity restoration services for at least 7 years.
Check to see if you're one of those covered by this settlement. And then make the claim. Make them pay.