Tech

Yahoo May Give You Up to $358 for Those Data Breaches

By Gabriela Vatu / October 8, 2019

Over 3 billion Yahoo accounts were breached back in 2012 and 2013 and Yahoo made sure to keep its mouth shut for a very long time about it. Well, you may be eligible to get over $350 for your trouble.

In what seems like forever ago, Yahoo was announcing that its site had been breached. The worst part was that the breach had happened years before the announcement itself and that Yahoo management chose to ignore the situation and chose marketing over truthfulness to their users. After all, what users don't know, can't hurt them, right?

Wrong! Hackers had dug through Yahoo's archives on at least two accounts for multiple days, downloading records with email addresses, telephone numbers, birthdates, passwords, security question answers, and more. You've probably checked by now, but if you haven't, you can type in your password on Have I Been Pwned and check to see if you were a victim of the Yahoo data breach or not.

Following a class action suit, Yahoo agreed to pay $117,500,000 as settlement. Therefore, if you had an account between January 1st, 2012, and December 31st, 2016, you're eligible for part of that cash. Actually, scratch that. Only if you live in the United States or Israel. There, that rounds it down quite a bit from those 3 billion people affected by the breach.

It's not just Yahoo Mail that falls under the settlement but also accounts on Yahoo Fantasy Sports, Yahoo Finance, Tumblr, or Flickr.

If you want to take part in the settlement, you have to contact the settlement administrator and confirm your part of the deal.

You can submit claims for money and credit monitoring through AllClearID which includes identity theft monitoring and up to $1 million in theft insurance and identity recovery assistant. If you already have credit monitoring and protection services, you can make a claim for a cash payment directly, and it could range between about $100 and $358.80.

If you've already paid out of your own pocket to address fraud and identity theft as a result of the breach, you can ask Yahoo to reimburse you up to $25,000 to cover the costs. There are also additional claims for up to 15 hours of your time spent recovering from the breach, getting a refund of up to 25% from the paid premium Yahoo Account and 25% of the amount paid for a Yahoo Small Business User email service, with a cap of $500 a year.

The deal seems pretty sweet, but there are a lot of people going ignored here since some 3 billion people were affected and the only ones getting a dime over the issue live in the United States or Israel.

So, are you going to file for a part of this data breach settlement? Drop us a note in the comments section below the article and tell us all about it. Share the news with friends and family and follow TechNadu on Facebook and Twitter for more tech news, guides, reviews, and interviews.



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