Tell HN: I just received my Equifax breach settlement check
For a total of $5.21
Info on the original settlement: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/you-can-go-claim...
I figured that was worth more than $5… though it is debatable.
> You filed a claim in the Equifax Data Breach Settlement and chose to receive free, three-bureau (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) credit monitoring from Experian for four years.
I'm concerned as the tend becomes normalized, when someone does finally bring a challenge in court where that's one of the matters to be dealt with, the company will simply say "industry standard".
Credit Karma is free, and has been very good. When I applied to finance a car online, within 15 seconds of me pressing "Submit" on the web page, I had an e-mail from Credit Karma that someone did a hard pull of my credit report.
Does the identity theft service you got do anything more than that that you would actually use?
We aren't even told when a government entity looks at and uses our private information. How in the world would we know when a criminal does, and how would we be able to say they looked at that specific leak instead of one of the other 10 possible sources of my leaked private information?
Maybe it is time to pool the damages of all identity thefts together, (about 56 billion in 2021) and split the bill (+ maintenance and administrative costs for managing the money) across all businesses that have leaked private data. That money could be used as a resource to all identity thefts victims to be made whole.
You can’t pool something you haven’t measured. This is a genuine question. I had thought we’d have demonstrated liability by now.
Just like in an assault/homicide case, if a victim has a heart attack and dies soon after you assaulted them, you can't prove that the attack led to the heart attack. Could just be bad timing. But most courts and juries would likely find the assaulter guilty to some extent.
This isn’t how civil damages work in any jurisdiction.
> like in an assault/homicide case
Apples and oranges. If the only way we can finger Equifax is by equating their actions to violent crimes, there is no case. That is increasingly my conclusion. These leaks have little to no actual cost.
How do propose liability could be demonstrated with something like this? Do you expect hackers and fraudsters to cite their sources when they are defrauding someone?
Following the Equifax breach, I experienced yearly identity theft using the combination of that name and my childhood address. Unless the teller who opened my original account has taken up a life of fraud and state hopping, Equifax is the likeliest culprit.
> I'm not complaining
> You filed a claim in the Equifax Data Breach Settlement and chose to receive free, three-bureau (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) credit monitoring from Experian for four years.
Seriously though, how did credit scores come about and was there any resistance at all at the time to peoples' financial information being collected en mass by private companies?
You act like this is ridiculous but the fact of the matter is that I would prefer that, because ultimately the difference agency in this situation I provide the lender my information that I control, in any other scenario my agency has been taken away by an outside group, whom I may or may not trust.
Hell imagine how different everything would be if instead of the Credit Unions working for the lenders I instead paid for a service myself that performed this service for me. The difference being one is done to me the other is done by me.
This wouldn’t work, because borrowers would only present receipts for credit they repaid on time while withholding information about lines of credit they failed to repay.
The point of credit history is that it exposes your past payments or failure to repay. It’s not an equivalent system if borrowers can just conveniently forget to mention the other loans they didn’t repay
Which is, of course, what we currently have, except it's the businesses who are able to "conveniently forget to mention" instead of the borrowers.
I pay myriad bills on time and in full every month, but only three of them--all loans--report my positive payment history to credit bureaus. Yet all of them, from mobile phone providers to landlords to utilities to insurance companies, insisted on being able to look at that payment history. They get the benefit of being able to evaluate me on an incomplete set of data; why shouldn't I get the return?
(The answer as always is that we don't have any leverage. Simply saying "well, then don't use those companies" is a non-answer when every company does it the same way and all of them lobby government to keep it that way.)
>I pay myriad bills on time and in full every month, but only three of them--all loans--report my positive payment history to credit bureaus
Okay, but the reason for that seems to be due to practicality reasons rather than some sort of concerted effort to oppress consumers. The types of accounts that do get reported to credit agencies (off the top of my head: credit cards, student/car/personal loans, mortgages) have one thing in common: they all have high dollar amounts in at least one of: monthly payment, total owed, and available credit. Being able to stay on top of payments and/or not get into debt spiral provides a much stronger signal about your credit worthiness than you being able to afford the $100/month electric bill. Therefore, bills typically don't get reported, and presumably that's factored in the credit models. After all, the bills that you mention are mostly mandatory (eg. utilities), so it's reasonable to assume that if you don't have any such bills sent to collection, that you got those bills and paid them on time for all of your adult life.
Why would someone want to give credit this way, though? If the rating is provided by a company that is paid by the person requesting credit, why would the company giving credit trust it?
Someone steals $1000 from a bank, they come to you and say hi he said his name was kmonsen so we would like to get the money back from you.
Maybe it's the bank's fault. Maybe it's the credit agency's fault. It's not sokoloff's fault. If there is harm to sokoloff, in the future, by the credit agency representing that sokoloff's credit is not what it should be because the credit agency did a bad job authenticating an identity when the bank asked about it, it should be liable (and libel).
The bank failed by authenticating fake-sokoloff as sokoloff. (I'm no fan of credit agencies, but I am a fan of correctly diagnosing system problems and assigning root cause to the right place in the system.)
There is a second-order effect where it should be straightforward for sokoloff to repudiate a loan taken out by fake-sokoloff and incorrectly tagged to sokoloff. An agency failing to follow that process may then be liable of libel.
If real-sokoloff is hurt, someone fucked up and needs to be held accountable and make real-sokoloff whole.
We can debate the how and the why, but the spirit of that sentence needs to be respected more highly than fairness to the bank or credit agency. Part of the reason they can be so Laissez Faire about it is because it's not their risk and they're not the ones that need to be made whole.
Regardless of how it happens, it needs to happen. Making it their risk would convince them to figure it out.
Credit bureaus routinely report false information and defame people based on false/unverified information that they don't even attempt to properly vet. If some random person called me on the phone and reported that you were a sex offender, and I dutifully repeated that to every job you applied for, every apartment you tried to rent and anyone else who asked me, I would be guilty of defaming you and responsible for damages. It should be no different for so-called credit reporting agencies.
You can avoid it by avoiding any of those accounts. Whether that is possible practically is another question.
Well it's sort of the key question though right?
The incentives of the credit reporting agencies are fundamentally unbalanced because the average consumer has no meaningful input into their behavior.
If could practically avoid having my information sent to bad actors they would be incentivized to treat my data with care.
This is an example of where good government regulation can be introduced (giving consumers the option to opt out) rather than what I would consider bad government regulation (trying to specify how the companies should behave directly).
I believe in the free market but I also understand that there are cases where incentives are incorrectly balanced and we need a neutral party to make sure all incentives are properly accounted for.
Howso? The lenders are obligated to submit truthful data, and under FCRA you can dispute fraud and incorrect data. And the FICO/Vantage scoring system can be computed from the data, they don't just spit out a hidden number generated by some ML model.
Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the...
If you read your own link, you'd discover that the former refers to companies like "Moody's Investors Service, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch Ratings". Needless to say, those are separate entities from credit bureaus, which are companies like equifax, transunion, and experian.
AFAIK those models aren't public. If you search around you'd find some vague factors and aproximate weights, but nowhere near enough data to reproduce the scores yourself. For the typical consumer and company, they're a black box just like a ML model.
Payment History: 35% of score. in no particular order:
- Late payments 30+ Days ("About 98% of FICO High Achievers have no missed payments at all") / Late Payments 60+ Days / Accounts Always Paid as Agreed / No Delinquent Accounts
- Collections ("FICO® Score 8 only considers collections with an amount of $100 or greater. Virtually no FICO High Achievers have a collection listed on their credit report") / Late Payments 60+ Days / Derogatory Public Records
- % revolving credit: ("For FICO High Achievers, the average ratio is less than 7%.")
- Number of Accounts with Balances ("FICO High Achievers have an average of 3 accounts carrying a balance.")
- Total balance on revolving and open-ended accounts ("Most FICO High Achievers owe less than $2,500 on revolving and/or open-ended accounts such as credit cards, charge cards and department store cards.")
- Average age of accounts ("Most FICO High Achievers have an average age of accounts of 9 years or more.")
- Age of Oldest Account ("FICO High Achievers opened their oldest account 25 years ago, on average.")
Credit Mix: 10% of score ("FICO High Achievers have an average of 11 revolving accounts, 5 installment accounts, 6 credit cards)
Also, a trend I see is that almost every option says "Authorized user accounts aren't considered in the calculation of this attribute", which might be a big contributor as to why Credit Karma / Vantage Score numbers are almost always higher than FICO, which leads to people thinking they have a higher number when they walk into a car dealership / apply for a loan.
But you're right in that I don't see any actual weights or FICO simulators.
who are the "bad actors" in this case? Equifax? Whoever equifax sold the information to? Whoever equifax got the information from?
>This is an example of where good government regulation can be introduced (giving consumers the option to opt out) rather than what I would consider bad government regulation (trying to specify how the companies should behave directly).
As the parent poster has mentioned, you can already "opt out" by not getting a loan. I agree that it'd be nice if some government regulation allowed to you to have your cake (ie. get loans) and eat it too (not have it reported), but there are two obvious problems:
1. One man's "private information" is another man's free speech. Why should a company be prevented from making true statements about its business dealings with you? You can leave nasty yelp reviews for businesses that have behaved inappropriately. Why shouldn't businesses be able to leave nasty credit reviews for individuals that failed to make payments?
2. On more practical level, opting out might put you in a high risk pool. Part of the enforcement mechanism for repaying loans is that if you don't, your credit gets wrecked and your life becomes harder. If you opted out of credit reporting, that's one enforcement mechanism that a lender wouldn't have, and therefore will adjust accordingly. Going back to the yelp analogy, imagine if yelp allowed businesses to opt out of reviews. Would you want to go to such a business, all else being equal?
Just wanted to comment on this to say: This is impossible. The reason why it's impossible is subtle because it comes from a source you'd not expect: Utility payments (power, gas, water, sewer, cable, internet, satellite, etc.). Utilities are always charged and paid for after they're delivered, and are thus loans and reported to the credit bureaus.
Also, credit bureaus don't just report on loans/debts. They also report on public proceedings that may or may not have financial consequences. And your employment record is also reported by many company's HR departments to these same bureaus.
So, short of going Ted Kaczynski (and even he had enough of a public presence to probably also have a credit report), you will exist in all of Credit Bureaus' databases.
Outside of loans that will opt you out of Experian selling your data. You should also opt out from your bank that sells your financial transactions to Bloomberg so hedge funds can front run earnings and business’s who can determine if your a big spender or not.
You can also do some trickery with companies (LLC or other) but the lawyer costs and annoyance may be high. But utilities are setup to bill companies with basically no credit (worst case you deposit or pre-pay).
Experian claims utilities don't report unless you don't pay: https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/can-unpaid-utili... but I don't know if I'd trust it, and they obviously "reserve the right" to do so.
My experience is that this is true. I literally have no credit, as in, reports from all 3 credit agencies returns with nada. mid-40's and I made this decision in college, and don't regret it.
I certainly have utility bills. There may be exceptions out there, but not in any of the municipalities I've lived in over the years.
These companies can't even keep track of what they're purportedly supposed to keep track of, why should they continue to exist as they do today?
After having a credit score north of 700 for over a decade that was at 780 at its peak, my score dropped to around 600. I was horrified. It's been a year and it still hasn't recovered and is currently around 700 through no fault of my own. The only debt I've had since 2018 is home loans.
Fuck them all.
Insane that there's little to no recourse for this at all, and that none of the parties responsible for such an error will be held responsible for them.
And if someone fraudulently defaulted you’d pursue criminal charges.
It’s totally workable but it would cut consumer spending considerably.
You could even still do credit cards - just require them to be backed by the amount in cash.
With better centralized data it's possible to having something of a win-win where banks get more customers and people can bootstrap their own lending reputation without having the last name "Jones".
Of course there's the tradeoff that you have to trust an institution to be a good steward of that data...
The ability to build credit isn’t actually an advantage in and of itself. In most other lines of business, if the business tried to point to “we’ve given you more opportunities to prove yourself a worthy customer” as a perk we’d laugh at them.
But what we have seen is that the banks and companies prey on the disadvantaged people pretty effectively; note the absolute magnitude of student loans given to poor students for degrees that don't show a practical repayment opportunity.
And there's also the argument that easy access to very-low interest rate credit precisely is what is causing house prices to be so astronomically high - if credit isn't as available.
The overall practical result would be an increase in the cost of credit and a slowing of the economy. Disadvantaged groups could be assisted in other ways, however; the way we try to do it is not necessarily the only possible way.
Now, is that really "volunteering" the data, or do you end in up roughly the same position as with the credit bureaus, where you need to turn over lots of personal information to get reasonable rates? I think reasonable people can disagree about that.
How is this help, not hurt? Insurers are tightly regulated in most states, and the sum of the premiums for a group can't be mlre than the losses for that group plus an allowed profit margin. If you give someone else in my group a discount, that's coming out of my pocket in some form or other. (Of course, if the discount encourages them to drive in a way that reduces losses, that could be money going into my pocket too; either way, I'm not letting them snoop on me, thanks)
They have a public credit bureau hosted by the national bank that records all the loans and credit. The data is not for sale to just about any company that is willing to pay for it, the individual has to give permission to share it when they apply for a loan. There isn't such bullshit as in the US where you practically have to push your student to get a credit card "to start building up a credit score."
The system works well enough that there's hardly any debate about it.
So basically the same as credit bureaus in the US, but it's a government monopoly? Given how well other government agencies work at least in the US (eg. DMV), I'm skeptical that waving a "government" wand would magically fix stuff.
>The data is not for sale to just about any company that is willing to pay for it, the individual has to give permission to share it when they apply for a loan
AFAIK that's also the case in the US. When you open a bank account/apply for a credit card, somewhere buried in the terms and conditions is a consent for a credit check.
>There isn't such bullshit as in the US where you practically have to push your student to get a credit card "to start building up a credit score."
In the US at least, the reason why it's commonly advised for students (and other young adults) to "build credit" is to build up a history of credit usage and repayments. I don't see why the same dynamic wouldn't exist in Belgium. Your own linked article says "Later, it added positive marks as well, allowing “no credit” and “good credit” to be distinguished", which suggests the same dynamic would exist in Belgium.
> somewhere buried in the terms and conditions is a consent for a credit check.
That’s luckily not allowed (as many other burial tactics) and has to be very visible and explicit. Though in the end that doesn’t change much because it’s not as if you have a choice (outside of saying no thanks to the whole thing)
> which suggests the same dynamic would exist in Belgium.
It doesn’t in Germany. If they don’t know you at all (= no contact with the banking system whatsoever), you are rated higher risk, but just having a bank account for some time is enough to have a good score.
Until data protection laws came along, they even charged you to see your own data, nowadays at least you get it free once per year.
IMO the biggest differences are the lack of having to "build credit", the incidental lack of an SSN that can be leaked, and the lack of companies allowing someone to wrongly take out a loan in your name and somehow making it your issue instead of theirs.
YYMMDD-XXX-CC
where YYMMDD is the birth date
XXX is the sequence number of a newborn that date or one of the yet unused numbers for foreign-born
CC is the mod 97 of
2YYMMDDXXX for those born over 1980 or YYMMDDXXX for the others
which means that it is easy to remember and not really a secret, unlike SSN.
As a side note, local bank accounts, wire transfer reference numbers, and company numbers also follow the same pattern of 9..10 digits + mod 97.
Compared to the Luhn algorithm for checksums used in the rest of ther world, these are a real joy to see and use.
With so much fuzz about Estonian digital state, I wonder why Belgium does not get the much deserved praise for implementing the basics just right.
Ohio BMV is basically a pleasure and a joy to visit every time I interacted. Staff was competent, offices were laid out logically, and time to completion was measured in minutes.
Texas, on the other hand, funds offices relative to the proportion of tax base in the area (this also disproportionately affects minorities, I've seen). Some areas are like the general Ohio BMV. Others one could reasonably point to and say getting an ID there is so difficult that it must be the goal (like voter suppression). At one of these, I waited over 5 hours in line only to find they skipped my number and wouldn't let me come back. We showed up 1.5 hours before opening and were in the line that wrapped around the block. Wait time after their screwup would have put getting services after closing (i.e. wasn't happening that day). I got lucky the second day I took off of work to get my license changed. But areas with higher tax base (Hebron area in Carollton, TX, part of Austin, TX, etc.) you get in and out quickly.
For government services you get what you pay for when you put appropriate monitoring in place.
>you get what you pay for when you put appropriate monitoring in place
That's the problem, isn't it? Recall my original comment:
>I'm skeptical that waving a "government" wand would magically fix stuff.
Sure, we might get the Ohio DMV experience, or the Texas DMV experience. It's not as simple as "nationalize it", and it turns out swimmingly. Given that such a database would have to be federal, you can expect all the federal level politics (eg. fundings/defundings, gridlock, government shutdowns) that go along with it.
RealID is a huge driver of increased demand for those services. Not only the bullshit around voter suppression and casual racism, but fundamentally areas with more immigrants and more complex documentation needs will take longer to service. Richer areas have a lower demand for services, but county clerks, etc, usually get a piece of the action.
Compare that to the bureaucracy and scammy nature of of car insurance providers, and it's a night and day difference.
IIRC, a few celebrities have ended up suing such services due to stalkers using them to hunt the celebrities down, so there ARE controls on them, but not typically for your normal person.
> Approximately 22.1 million records were affected, including records related to government employees, other people who had undergone background checks, and their friends and family.
> One of the largest breaches of government data in U.S. history, information that was obtained and exfiltrated in the breach included personally identifiable information such as Social Security numbers, as well as names, dates and places of birth, and addresses.
Government-run credit-bureau, like Thailand's National Credit Bureau (NCB), that isn't trying to make a buck. Bank of Thailand (who are behind NCB) is also responsible for Prompt Pay, which is a most-excellent and ubiquitous QR-code and cell-number based instant payment system.
American retail banking appears to have been screwed hard by "leaving it to the markets", where government intervention and threats have given us Faster Payments (UK), SEPA Instant (EU), Prompt Pay (TH) etc
Looking at this comparison table[1], it seems like the options in the US (Zelle and RTP) arrived in similar timeframes to RT1 in the EU?
Genuinely, I don't know the answer to this -- maybe the US account Wise provides me with is limited? Additionally, every time a Bitcoin maximalist shows up, if they're American they'll tout "fast, cheap payments!" and "right, but what if you wanted to make a transfer to a different bank AND on a weekend?!" as benefits, which are the benefits much of the developed world already has and doesn't think twice about any more.
... and also tiny interchange fees in the UK and EU: https://www.clearlypayments.com/blog/interchange-fees-by-cou...
Of note: "The USA has the least regulatory oversight resulting in the highest interchange fees in the world. The same data below compares the interchange fee by country in chart form."
Gee, I wish there was a method for two counterparties to record a transaction publicly and pseudo anonymously so that one might be able to display a mathematical proof of satisfactory fulfillment (or not) of an agreement.
<ctrl-f blockch: no results>
Well, that’s just crazy talk
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/asian-journal-of-law...
Neither are perfect, I prefer privacy but I don’t know what is the socially optimal way to protect privacy and promote investment
My understanding is that your income and work contracts are inspected, and that banks can see your other loans / lines of credit.
The rule of thumb is that your loans payment must not be above 1/3 of your income.
To check your income the bank will ask you for a tax document and pay stubs.
People buy house and cars, and the country did not start the sub primes crises in 2008.
Seems to work well enough.
There's also a government-managed register of bad payers (called "interdit bancaire" - literally "forbidden from banking") for which there's a lengthy process to get onto that may involve court action - the lenders literally have to take you to court.
This means there is a due process to get onto the register, and a simple misunderstanding or fraudulent company can't ruin your credit (unless they want to lie to a government official and potentially to a court).
There's a strong distrust of government across the entire political spectrum. The difference is that one half thinks the solution is to let private corporations handle everything because they have this strange delusion that a corporation actually has their interests in mind beyond the bare minimum to earn a profit. The other half has a delusion that government can be fixed.
I struggle with this one. If they don’t know how to do X, find people that do and hire them as civil servant, with a slightly less than average salary.
I know it’s not that trivial, but I don’t see why conceptually it cannot be fixed?
( asking as a new us citizen btw; I voted for the first time a few month back. Yes, this place is fucked. I will probably not retire here. Or even stay that long.
But there is a few things going for us. For instance direct democracy is more alive than most. Electing judges, specifically in that debatable precedent system… is really powerful and readily accessible.)
Sometimes these combine. Like, if the state wants to build a new road, they'll give the contract to whoever is going to donate the most to the governor's campaign during the next election, even if that means it costs a lot more.
It doesn't help that our voting system creates a scenario that will always devolve into just two political parties. Any third party candidate ends up being a spoiler for a similar party and guarantees a victory for the other major party. This is why Democrats are hoping Trump runs for President as a third party, as it would split the Republican vote and hand the Democrats an effortless win.
We only have direct democracy for local and state offices. Presidential elections are not a direct democracy.
The first one should be harshly reign in IMO. Having strict and enforced limitation on donations works. The proof : crooked politician try to get around it and are sometime getting caught. ( sarkozy, chirac )
Second one is more mechanical: having > 2 parties allow politics to happen.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FS.AST.PRVT.GD.ZS?end=2...
This is how it works in Denmark for property mortgages. There is security in the house and up to 80% of the house price can be lent. It's up to the credit institution and bank to decide whether to approve you for the loan based on an expense budget provided by you, pay slips for the past 3 months and the property valuation. Bank provides the contact between you and the credit institution as well as budget vetting, the credit institution sells bonds to investors to raise the money for the mortgage. Risk is spread over the bond series and is carried by the credit institution.
We have some of the lowest mortgage rates anywhere. Current 30 year rate is 5%. This is after a huge hike in the last year after having been at 0% or even negative for at least 5 years.
So yeah, for large investments like property mortgages with considerable security drop the credit rating and spread the risk across enough people. On average it will be cheaper.
This has disadvantages for some people over a credit rating system, even if it’s overall cheaper for the people who can get loans under it.
In some cases the down payment can be a bank loan at significantly higher rates. I did this for my house and the rate for the down payment loan was something like 8% while mortgage was 2%. I forget what percentage of the total was a bank loan but it was around 10-15%.
There are not the same conditions on the bank loan, though. E.g. a bank loan can in theory be called in with a months notice, while this is not the case for the bond based mortgage.
Consumer demand.
If given the choice between a lower rate loan that utilized people’s centrally collected credit history or a higher rate loan that didn’t rely on any centralized organization, the vast majority of people would take the lower rate loan with a credit score. It wouldn’t even be close.
The bottom line is that centralized credit reporting is necessary to achieve the lowest rates. The threat of a reduced credit score is necessary to get a lot of people to pay back loans.
https://library.harvard.edu/collections/rg-dun-company-credi...
Former Equifax CEO Richard Smith resigned rather than being fired, and got to leave with a $90 million severance package including $18 million of pension, although the breach is estimated to have cost the firm $700 million. He still sits on the board of Docusign.
If you want to see them impact, look at what shares prices do the day a breach is announced and the day it settles. The impact was priced-in long before, and shareholders already felt it.
* well, not all stock allows voting, some companies have different classes of stock to prevent plebs having leverage over corporate decision-making. Since I'm making up possible rules, I'd ban that too.
It is very sadly the only way to get some form of reparation from the damage they have done in a justice system that still sees its "job creators" as gods on earth.
Best to date was the Apple small developer settlement that paid out $8k. Previous was the Google/Apple non-compete settlement.
I’ve never bothered with the consumer-focused ones. There are always so many class members you’re lucky to get a couple bucks - as in the OP’s case.
Or would a scammer use obviously fake class action lawsuits in order to filter for the stupidest people possible?
Depends on how many people fall for the scam I guess.
If the scammers can outrank they legit site, I am hosed though.
Facebook: https://www.facebookbipaclassaction.com/ and https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/01/facebook-illinois-class-ac...
Google: https://www.googlebipasettlement.com/ and https://www.engadget.com/google-photos-bipa-lawsuit-settleme...
You can in principle look up the case numbers that should be present in the court documents explaining the settlement. Alternatively you can look it up in a public database such as [1], (also a good way to find suits you qualify for, if you so desire).
“I’d sign that purchase order, Bill, but our CLO is literally holding a gun to my head and sobbing saying it’s better this way”
I don’t think at all anyone should do this cheaply haha. And imagine if the CLO told the board the other C-suite were squirreling secrets away. And individuals can always be indicted for fraud
I don't care if the C-levels (other than the CEO and President of the board) go to prison. I want to see the CEO and ALL board members in prison for life with no possibility of parole.
In a more just world, Equifax would go out of business and the assets would be divided among the affected parties. The fact that that won't happen isn't your buddy's fault. At the end of the day, sure, he gets high fees, but if the lawyers in the equifax case were to distribute their fees to victims, maybe I would have gotten $6 instead of $5? My point is, I'm mad at Equifax a lot more so than your buddy.
source: https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/admin/services/conne...
Really, these cases are mostly a way for lawyers to make money, because on a person-by-person basis there's just not enough money to be made in pursuing legal action, but with millions of class members, the aggregate amount is pretty high, and 20 or 33% of that for the lawyers ends up being a nice paycheck.
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/heres-a-look-at-all-th...
My take is basically that in many class action suits there's limited proof of wrongdoing. So it might not make it to court, and if it did make it to court it might be thrown out. Companies pay out since they aren't sure either, but not for the full amount. The lawyers are investing in a suit with unstable ground.
Because it's so wishy-washy there just isn't much money in it, and in consequence the payouts are limited.
So I'm not sure there's a better way to do it. I do wish the lawyers were more upfront about the above in their messaging to class members (like, "we don't have enough definite evidence to get a conviction, but enough that it's risky for the company, so we can settle for a lower amount") as well as how much it will actually mean per individual, what consequences are likely for the company if the suit succeeds, etc.
Not a lawyer (obviously) so if anyone has better info I'd be interested.
Leverage in court, so it’d be used to lessen payouts.
In all cases, repairs were covered for the first 4 years so most of them should've been done for free, the settlement is purely for compensating time and effort.
I literally bought Arco gas ONCE, and it was only a couple gallons to top off a U-Haul after a short move.
I thought it was insane that the payout was so high.
As far as class action based on actual damage and aggregations thereof. I believe that may be a strategy, unfortunately most of those end up going to government entities. So the very people who will not legislate statute to protect you will be in the same organization as the Attorney's General that will sue the firms and receive the damages...
Oh well...
My favorite is that in church sexual abuse scandals the victims see close to no money, but the lawyers always get paid.