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Comment by miked85 | Hacker News Reader

It usually takes years to get paid anything for these class actions, and then you might get a check for $5

This is very true but sometimes it’s worth it. I got over $3K from the price-fixing eye contact settlement. Normally signing up for these things takes less than 10min and sometimes you hit big. Though in this case I’m not expecting much.

Oh yeah, might as well do it anyways just to see what you get from it. The amount of time is pretty crazy though, at least in my experience.

Totally agree on the time. The contact settlement collected info in early 2020, I got the surprisingly large check 3 weeks ago. Now the pandemic messed with the times a bit but it’s normally years you have to wait in my experience. One day a check for $2.46 comes in the mail and you remember “oh yeah, this is for that XYZ settlement”.

I got over $2000 from the class action against banks for sneaky foreign transaction fees. It did, however, require a lot of documentation.

It makes some sense that the more effort it takes to submit a claim, the more money you’re likely to receive.

The lawyers however get the jackpot: `Class Counsel will ask the Court for an award of attorneys’ fees not to exceed 25% of the Settlement Fund, as well as reasonable expenses`

180M USD to represent the rights of people who didn't ask for your help.

It would be good that you can easily claim it but make sure that you just instead donate to some organization like EFF. For single person $5 or $35 is small money not maybe worth the hassle but for charity organization it might be a big amount of money on the table.

Just an idea for those organizations - maybe create some browser addon or more user friendly claim form to easily donate such type of claims to them.

I got a case of free Red Bull at one point as payment. They said I could have a check for $5 or a case of product, so I took the product lol.

So making and shipping a case of red bull costs them less than $5. Or maybe they tough it would help to drawn the sorrows?

A quick search says it was a four pack of red bull, which retails for about $7 today. Probably pretty close to the same cost, and a brand would almost always rather give you product than cash. People will say "I'll take this $5 and never drink red bull again," they won't say "I'll take this case of red bull and then never drink anymore."

The app development settlement was quite large: up to $25,000 per developer. I bet a lot of people here made a lot of money from that class action.

how do we find this settlement? did it already pass?

Still waiting for my check(s) from a Microsoft settlement back in 2006 that had something to do with NY State. No idea how much I was entitled to, but since I owned several Windows machines during the period in question it should have been enough for at least a few beers.

I just cashed a $68 check from yahoo that I vaguely remember signing up for at some point in my life. I fill the forms out and never expect anything, then one day I'll get a small check out of nowhere and each time I'll be surprised by it

I still have not been paid for my iPhone 6 battery.

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