(NEXSTAR) – The $350 million T-Mobile agreed to pay in a 2022 class action settlement will finally start going out to customers next month.
The class action lawsuit came after a cyberattack in August 2021 compromised the personal data of 76 million T-Mobile customers in the U.S. The data that was breached included customers’ names, addresses and Social Security numbers.
T-Mobile denied any wrongdoing in the data breach, but agreed to the $350 million payout to settle the lawsuit.
After years of legal disputes and delays, the payments are set to be issued starting in April 2025, the settlement administrator said.
Those eligible to receive a payment were notified back in 2022, but it’s understandable if you’ve lost track since then. Generally speaking, all 76 million customers whose data was compromised in the cyberattack qualify.
The size of the payment you receive will partially depend on how much time and money you lost as a result of the breach.
If you “spent money trying to avoid or recover from fraud or identity theft that you believe was fairly traceable to the T-Mobile Data Breach,” you qualify for the biggest payout: reimbursement of up to $25,000. These customers were instructed to provide documentation of their losses, which could include the time it took to freeze their credit, money spent on credit monitoring services, or losses resulting from identity theft.
T-Mobile customers who didn’t file that sort of documentation still get a piece of the settlement fund – just a much smaller one. If you didn’t claim any out-of-pocket losses but were impacted by the massive breach, you could receive a cash payment of up to $25 (or $100 for people who lived in California in August 2021).
Those payment estimates are the maximum – not the minimum – amount you should expect to receive when checks are issued next month. The $350 million fund has to cover lawyers’ fees, administrative expenses and tens of millions of potentially valid claims.
The fund will prioritize reimbursing out-of-pocket losses. The leftover amount will be distributed on a “pro rata basis” as cash payments. That means your payment could ultimately be smaller than $25.
Recent multi-million dollar settlements have resulted in disappointed customers who received as little as $2 due to the large size of the settlement class.
If you’re still unsure if you qualify for a payment, you can contact the settlement administrator online or call 1-833-512-2314 for more information.
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