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Comment by jbredeche | Hacker News Reader

If this breach affected 147M people (which is what I can find from various articles), and $700M was set aside (before attorney fees), and most claims will be $125, that's only ~4M people who will get $125.

Are they expecting very few people to file claims? Or what am I missing?

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It sounds to me like they'll give you free credit monitoring, UNLESS YOU ALREADY HAD CREDIT MONITORING, then they'll give you $125. Most people don't have credit monitoring, I think. Personally, I've found the free credit monitoring that they gave me pretty useless. I get an email regularly telling me my score changed. I have to go log in and find out I went up 2 points because of an algorithm change. Thanks for looking out, Equifax! Then I go to a dealer and they pull my credit and it's dramatically higher than what Equifax has been telling me. The whole system seems silly to me.

It is either-or, not both. If you want the money you have to promise you have credit monitoring from somewhere else. Credit Karma (for example) counts as free credit monitoring and you can easily make an account before making the claim. Many credit cards come with monitoring too.

I believe NerdWallet counts as well.

The credit information and the score given to an individual is completely different from what is given to an Equifax customer.

I have about four different free and offered after breach monitoring services. It seems to average about a new one breach and "monitoring" every couple of years recently.

> I get an email regularly telling me my score changed. I have to go log in and find out I went up 2 points because of an algorithm change

In the Canadian version of Equifax you can set how much of a score change send an email.

Funny thing is I still have the credit monitoring service I got for free from the PSN breach settlement...

According to the FAQ if more than $31 million in claims are made, the amount of the payment will be reduced. So, the number of people who can receive $125 is ~250,000. I can't imagine they'll get fewer claims than that given how many people were included in the breach.

That's just wild. Where's the rest of the money going?

Source: https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/faq#q-10

From the FAQ:

> If there are more than $31 million claims for Alternative Reimbursement Compensation, all payments for Alternative Reimbursement Compensation will be lowered and distributed on a proportional basis.

No one is going to get $125, we’ll maybe get $5–without doing the math.

Supposedly only ~3% of eligible people make claims in a typical class action case (according to a r/personalfinance poster claiming they work around such cases).

If more people file, does the fine increase or the payout decrease?

The payout would decrease.

Yes, the Red Bull one was supposed to be $10 but so many people joined that class my check ended up being ~$2.50 instead.

Sounds like a great payout for the lawyers, but a terrible one for individuals. I bet you have to sign off on 'never holding equifax liable again for this breach' as part of your free monitoring

You can actually get more than $125 if you prove that you suffered a loss, or spent time fighting fraud on your account to the tune of $25/hr

$25/hr is peanuts

For developers, yes, but most sources report the average hourly wage in the US at around $23-30/hour.

And average wage is a bad metric anyway - a more appropriate one would be median hourly wage, which is in the neighborhood of $18/hr[1]

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm

I suspect that's a ceiling, and payouts will receive a proportional haircut if claims exceed what's been set aside.

Perhaps they are counting on a certain number using their free credit monitoring, as that's the other option on the site.

It's also the default, so some will just click through

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