In early April of this year, after more than a decade of litigation and a $90-million settlement, Mark Zuckerberg sent me forty bucks on Venmo.
To be clear, it wasn’t Zuck personally. That $40.67 was my cut of the payout from a class action lawsuit: the “Facebook Internet Tracking Litigation” case (not to be confused with the “Facebook, Inc. Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation,” payment pending). Since January, I’ve secured other payouts of $21.65, $20.04 (twice), $14.81 and $12.60 as a result of class action settlements, and there are almost certainly more to come.
If you spend enough time on the internet, odds are that you too have stumbled into the class action expanded universe. You’re not alone: According to a recent defense attorney interest group report, there was $42 billion in class action settlements reached last year, “the third highest value we have tallied in the last two decades, trailing only the settlement numbers from 2023 ($51.4 billion) and 2022 ($66 billion).” Given the proliferation of corporate monopolies, legal cases brought against tech companies will naturally include more and more claimants and bigger and bigger settlements. Ads marketing these lawsuits are popping up on social media and, while most people ignore them, there are Facebook groups, lawyers, and hunters like myself, all dedicated to chasing down these payouts.
On top of that, a change in federal rules in 2018 laid the groundwork to make email the most common class-action notice delivery method—so it’s entirely possible that right now, hiding in a spam folder, there’s an unread message declaring that you’re already part of one. Open the email, enter your class member code, maybe provide some receipts (unless it’s a “no-proof” settlement), and pick your delivery method; they have Venmo, Zelle, prepaid cards, paper checks, direct deposit, etc. After a couple of years, boom! Instant money.
But while applying to get some of that money has never been more convenient, the vast majority of eligible claimants will never see a dime: A 2019 study by the Federal Trade Commission put the claims rate for class actions at an outrageously low 4 percent by weighted mean.
Take cases about data breaches or privacy violations. There were more than 250 million users in the class of those affected by the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal—essentially, everyone in the US with a Facebook account. Out of the eligible class size of 250 million, only 17 million valid claims were filed. There’s the spate of recent “social media addiction” cases looking for more class members by (ironically enough) advertising on Instagram, plus the semi-recent class action that chastised the once-mighty Juul for targeting teens, and the very, very recent Lopez v. Apple Inc. settlement, which could give folks $20 per Siri-enabled device if you sign up by July 2.
Many people ignore these messages—assuming they’re a scam, or thinking the payout isn’t worth the hassle. But other people, like April Phelps, are filing claims with gusto.
“I check daily,” says Phelps, a Memphis-based health care worker who estimates she’s received almost $8,000 since 2023 by keeping up with the various postcards, emails, and online advertisements that work to bring eligible claimants into a class action. “Out of a seven-day week, no more than about two and a half hours—probably 30 minutes or so a day—just to scroll through and see if there’s been any updates or any new settlements that impact me. I’ll check my junk mail too, just to make sure.”
I found Phelps on a 30,000-plus-member Facebook group set up by Top Class Actions, a news site that tracks and offers updates on various ongoing class actions. People in the TCA Settlements & Payouts group help confused first-timers navigate eligibility, answer questions about when settlement payments might come in and post updates about case results. These kinds of sites are what I recommend to people who ask, because since 2021, I’ve become “class action guy,” reminding family members to file claims, check their spam folders, and get that money.
Technically, I was party to my first class action all the way back in 2016, with litigation related to the Aliso Canyon gas leak, which WIRED reported as the “worst climate disaster in US history” at the time. That process was mainly via email and on the phone, and the payout took seven years to show up—but in the meantime, I kept searching for “settlement” in my email.
In 2021, that led me to Mansour v. Bumble Trading Inc., a settlement in California based on claims that Bumble was discriminating against male users by only letting women message first. I signed up, waited for my payout, and after that was Rivera et al. v. Google LLC (Google photos storing face data without consent), plus Sosa v. Onfido (biometric privacy violation), California v. Vitol (manipulated gas prices), even Milan v. Clif Bar & Co. (misleading labels on Clif Bars), and my beloved Facebook Internet Tracking Litigation.
It’s not that I have a personal vendetta against these companies. I still eat the Clif Bars. But by gosh, the law says I’m owed some money, these companies probably did do something wrong (even if they don’t admit it), and frankly, the payout feels a bit like winning in a legal system designed for people to lose. Why wouldn’t I take it?
That’s close to the story I was told by Phelps, as well. She says she’s been on the lookout for class actions since 2021, when she found out she was party to litigation against Blue Cross Blue Shield via a notice hidden in her junk mail.
“More people need to start paying attention, because if you miss a deadline, in some cases, for a $10,000 cheque, you’re going to be upset,” she says. “I wish I was getting $10,000, but some people are eligible to receive that, and they don’t take it seriously because they don’t do their research.”
Phelps says that the most helpful avenue for staying informed has been the smattering of groups on Facebook, where people answer questions, offer advice, and upload pictures of payouts: Venmo, Zelle, prepaid cards, and paper checks. Phelps says the group helped her evangelize a couple of friends and her mom into class action consciousness.
“It’s not like these are poor defenseless companies, right? They committed an error,” she says. “If more people pay attention, honestly, I feel like these manufacturers or these businesses will stop being so quick to offer things to us without doing their research.”
Despite how helpful these groups have been for some people, they’re still a poor substitute for an official government portal, says Amanda M. Rose, a professor of law at Vanderbilt University.
“There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for technology solving these problems, although we see … that it hasn’t necessarily borne itself out,” she says.
Rose adds that a federally run website and support system (ClassAction.gov, say) could help increase claim rates, cut down on confusion, and create a database for researchers looking to make policy suggestions on public oversight of class actions. Without that infrastructure, the void is filled by third-parties (like the absurdly named “ClaimClam,” called out by the DC attorney general last year), who can use AI to identify potential class members in lawsuits and settlements, get them to submit claims via their platform and then take a cut of their settlements. ClaimClam also charged consumers “15%, and in some cases 40%,” of their claim, while also misleading them to think that settlements were guaranteed, and hiding that the law firm they were recommending was also co-owned by the same founder, according to a settlement between the company and the office of the DC attorney general. Even the top aggregator sites, like ClassAction.org or the aforementioned TopClassActions.com, are private companies that can earn referral fees from law firms for offering info on the class actions.
The lack of a federal database also makes it difficult to track down claimants who have changed addresses, determine if the legalese has been effectively translated into plain English, or figure out if the notices are getting past the spam filter—and all of these problems are exacerbated by a glaring lack of data on record. Are the claims settlement administrators who are charged with finding eligible class members doing a thorough job? According to Rose, solving these issues has always been a problem, but no one in particular is keeping track.
“You can’t even have an intelligent public policy debate about these matters without having better insight into them,” says Rose.
That argument touches on one of the core pillars in American jurisprudence supporting class actions—as a type of public service in the form of a deterrent.
“At least in our legal culture, we have decided that we should make it possible for people with small value claims to bring them all together,” says Deborah Hensler, professor of dispute resolution at Stanford Law School.
“Perhaps a large number of people have claims, but the claims are worth fairly small amounts of money. Maybe they lost $25 each? A corporation could make a lot of money by collecting lots and lots of $25,” she says. “But individually, going to court for $25? Forget it.” Thus, class actions.
According to Hensler, class actions in one form or another have been part of US law for centuries. A dispute in 1820 over the estate of a deceased general, West v. Randall, is widely considered the first, though Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legal segregation in 1954, is probably the most well-known example. She considers their prevalence to be a function of an American court system that has fewer barriers to entry than many others, including much lower court filing fees, the option for lawyers to advertise, and legal representation on contingency (which is widely regulated or outright disallowed in many other countries).
“When you have a system that is so law-oriented, and you have a lot of lawyers and you have a way for people to find lawyers, even if they don’t have very much money, then you have a way for lawyers to make money by taking people’s cases,” Hensler says. “Then when some issue arises—like Facebook privacy—there are some lawyers who say ‘That’s interesting, maybe I could bring a class action.’”
Because the legal precedent is so complex, Hensler says there are many laws on the books allowing class actions to be brought for everything from the aforementioned privacy violations to the spate of recent class actions with wide political implications, like J.G.G. v. Trump, where a judge ordered deportation flights of Venezuelan men to be turned back, an order the Trump administration ignored.
“The current cases are on behalf of people who are claiming they have been improperly, illegally treated by the Trump Administration,” Hensler says. “They’re trying to get the courts to say ‘Stop doing this,’ not just for one person, but for all the people like them.”
Aside from their use in recent immigration cases, class actions as legal tools are actually in a bit of a hard place. The Class Action Fairness Act, signed into law by the Bush administration in 2005, made it easier for defendants to shift their cases to federal court from the state level, a move that ultimately made class actions harder to certify, slower to resolve, and more expensive to pursue.
Instead, plaintiffs’ lawyers have shifted toward mass torts, mass-claim litigation, and multidistrict litigation—approaches that involve coordinating large numbers of individual claims, rather than trying to certify a single class. In the pre-internet era, coalescing that many claimants would be Sisyphean; in 2025, it’s almost smooth sailing.
“The underlying issue is that modern society produces mass injuries, mass complaints, mass everything,” Hensler says. “We’ve done a pretty good job in this country of trying to come up with procedures for dealing with this ‘mass claim’ phenomenon—a better job than virtually every other country in the world—but we haven’t figured it out yet.”
Something that shouldn’t be hard to figure out is that regardless of the particular legal avenue, the class or mass action notifications are just going to keep coming—so people like Phelps and I will keep scanning social media and checking our spam folders. Maybe in a couple more years, I’ll get a notification about another forty bucks. And until then, I’ll keep scrolling, filing, and quietly cashing in, because if corporations can profit off our data, habits, and mistakes, the least we can do is get paid back when they screw up.
It’s not justice, exactly—just the version we’re left with in a system where accountability is slow, flawed, and monetized. But until something better comes along, I’m not leaving free money on the table. You shouldn’t either.
