If you receive an email from Paypal, giving you some money for the FTC Prime Subscription Settlement, please know that it is real and legitimate. It’ll look like this:
The email will come from “service@paypal.com” and its buttons and links will also lead to the Paypal website. This is not a scam. The payment amounts may vary, up to $51.
What Happened
Last year, the US Government sued Amazon for engaging in dark patterns. The primary allegations claimed that Amazon misled millions of people into joining their Prime program, and then made it exceedingly difficult to cancel their pricey memberships. When all was said and done, Amazon admitted no fault but settled to the tune of $2.5 Billion. $1B was a penalty Amazon paid to the government, $1.5B was to be distributed back to those impacted by Amazon’s deceptive business practices.
And Amazon has already sent some of that money back to its ̶̷v̷i̷c̷t̷i̷m̷s̷ eligible customers, earlier this year. But due to delays I don’t fully grasp, some people are just now seeing these payment emails arrive. And these messages may come as a surprise, since a lot of people didn’t sign up for a settlement payment.
If You Receive a Payment
If you submitted a claim, then you will get one or more emails, as shown above. It will tell you that they routed your money to whatever payment method you chose during submission. You won’t have to do anything, except maybe to go verify that the money is in your Paypal or Venmo account!
But if you never submitted a claim? Then these payments will be disbursed, to the email address originally connected a Prime subscription. You’ll get a link to accept your payout into a Paypal account.
Don’t use Paypal? Then I doubt you can collect the money from this automatic payment. The settlement terms seem decidedly unyielding, and e-payments look to expire within 30 days if not accepted. If you don’t want to sign up for a Paypal account, you could try to contact the people in charge of the settlement. There’s a slim chance they’d send you a check in the mail.