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Audio By Carbonatix
Two years back, Equifax gifted the names, birthdates, and Social Security numbers of 147 million people, marking one of the biggest security breaches in history.
The leaked information is enough to obliterate people’s credit for years, which is why last Monday, a judge ruled the bureau will have to establish a fund to compensate people who were impacted by the breach as the result of a class-action lawsuit. Equifax were ordered to pay over $700 million in payments, including fines.
Last week, people could go to an Equifax website to see if they qualified for a $125 pay out as part of that settlement, and the responses were overwhelming. So overwhelming that Robert Schoshinski, assistant director of the F.T.C.’s division of privacy and identity protection, released the following statement:
But the pot of money that pays for that part of the settlement is $31 million. A large number of claims for cash instead of credit monitoring means only one thing: each person who takes the money option will wind up only getting a small amount of money. Nowhere near the $125 they could have gotten if there hadn’t been such an enormous number of claims filed.
As GQ points out, “of the $700 million Equifax agreed to pay out, only 0.044 percent was designated to repay the people affected by the breach with the rest, apparently, paying for fines.” This is evidence that the company and the F.T.C. were banking on far fewer people filing claims, but when public figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted about it to her 5 million followers, the masses flooded to what they thought would be a free $125 payday.
For victims to get the $125, the response would have had to have been limited to 248,000 people, or about a sixth of 1% of the victims, NY Post reports.
With at least 4.5 million already clamoring for the cash option, the implied payout for each respondent currently stands at $6.89 and falling.
God damnit, shouldn’t have run up that bar tab on Monday night. I thought Equifax was footing the bill. Everything is always too good to be true.
[h/t GQ]