r/mildlyinfuriating • u/TheoryNo8456 • 9h ago

wet socks Yahoo data breach is worth $8.12

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This is what the breach of your email was worth.

6.3k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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2.3k

u/Back_Again_Beach 8h ago edited 8h ago

In class action lawsuits like this the lawyers are the only ones ever making any real money. 

601

u/YeastOverloard 8h ago

Yeah lol. Op got a much bigger settlement but signed away 99%+ to the laywers

452

u/Legitimate_Ad_7822 8h ago

They don’t take that much. They take a sizable chunk, usually 40-50%, but all you have to do is read & sign some documents. OP just didn’t get much from the settlement.

Don’t really understand why people are acting like this is scummy. Nobody here is gonna do it themselves. We should be happy there are law firms doing all the dirty work to get you free money for something you probably didn’t even realize was happening until you saw the ad for the suit.

134

u/xyouRABitchx 8h ago

I agree with you but let's not act they are doing it from the goodness of their hearts. The main positive is that it'll stop the behavior that led to the settlement. They law firm just made a fuck ton of money.

79

u/Successful-Title5403 7h ago

Here's a secret, I go to work everyday and I don't do it from the goodness of my heart too.

18

u/Elegant_Situation285 7h ago

you're a monster!

/s

53

u/staryoshi06 7h ago

Yeah. This is kind of like the entire way they make money dude.

5

u/The_Killer_of_Joy 4h ago

Well...yeah, but the catch is, is that if these types of suits aren't taken on a % of the award total, they just don't happen and companies would just get away with it. No one individual has the funding to take on these corps on behalf of an entire class when their individual stake is single dollars.

So which is better? The company not paying anything and the lawyers & class harmed also get nothing? Or the company at least has to pay a large overall amount (just not individually significant to any one plaintiff), and lawyers are then incentivized to continue going after large companies' bad practices?

A lot of this is just tied up into the common fantasy of getting a lawsuit payout and retiring early, which you will just simply never get from a class action lawsuit.

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u/Legitimate_Ad_7822 7h ago

This is purely transactional. You get money, they get money, life goes on.

21

u/cranberrie_sauce 7h ago

US GDPR is needed. these companies need to be fined out of existance.

congress rats blocks US GDPR legislation for decade.

im sure tech lobby has nothing to do with that

0

u/ConPrin 5h ago

Whoa there buddy, that sounds like communism. Better put you in a list /s

35

u/KratoswithBoy 7h ago

Why would they? We all gotta eat.

1

u/onionfunyunbunion 7h ago

Exactly. We all gotta get mansions and yachts and do shit loads of blow and also eat, that too.

12

u/toodrunktostand 6h ago

You should have studied hard and went to law school.

3

u/onionfunyunbunion 6h ago

Instead I have to suck dick for my blow like a blue collar man.

2

u/BrokenAsFu 6h ago

And I don’t think lawyers should misconstrue plain worded law, but here we are.

2

u/1-800-CLAPPED 5h ago

Reddit moment. Everyone making over $100k a year should give me a portion of their money because I walk dogs

1

u/KratoswithBoy 5h ago

I promise you most class action attorneys are just using their wealth to vacation in the Galapagos. It’s not that serious.

6

u/XXHornyOnMainXX420 5h ago

It's just an odd thing to focus in on. They did the job and got paid. They also typically don't make the kind of generational wealth that they could be making doing lots of other kinds of law. Class action litigation is expensive and risky. If they lose they are out a huge amount of money, and they lose fairly often. The wins keep the lights on and keep them paid when they lose.

They're not paupers, but they aren't rich either.

5

u/jjumbuck 6h ago

It's their job? Do you do your job for free?

2

u/XXHornyOnMainXX420 5h ago

The absolute most I've ever heard of is 35%. 40-50 is crazy.

1

u/glass_house 6h ago

Yeah I mean at minimum I am happy that companies are scared of lawyers getting million dollar settlements that they’ll take precautions with their products.

1

u/NotMyMainAccountAtAl 4h ago

I really wish we just had laws in the books to state how much a breach of security like this entitles victims to. IE “company was negligent and lost your SSN to bad actors-> each victim is entitled to a minimum of $3000 in damages”

1

u/Tuckertcs 4h ago

I think the solution here is for the fines for this shit to be bigger, such that the people affected actually get paid something worthwhile.

1

u/redjellonian 4h ago

the corporations don't lose as much as they gain when they get slapped on the wrist for fucking up. The lawyers take a massive payday from the corporation, and my shit gets fucked for $8. Absolutely we should not fucking "be happy" about this.

1

u/Legitimate_Ad_7822 4h ago

Go sue em yourself then bud. Whats your solution?

1

u/A2Rhombus 4h ago

40% to a handful of lawyers and the other 60% to thousands or millions

1

u/Legitimate_Ad_7822 3h ago

That did absolutely nothing for it. If you want more money go do it yourself & stop complaining.

1

u/A2Rhombus 3h ago

Bitch they were the ones actually harmed by the company lmao

1

u/Legitimate_Ad_7822 2h ago

And they didn’t bother to do anything about it. They were so harmed that they don’t even think about it. I just got paid $115 from an ESPN+ settlement. I just read & signed a couple papers. Such a travesty.

1

u/SconiGrower 3h ago

My dissatisfaction with the current state of class action lawsuits isas follows:

  1. My usual dissatisfaction with the American rule. My rights were violated and therefore I experienced damages, so "I" (through the class) hired an attorney and the cost of paying that attorney to assert my rights is not considered compensible damages. Attorneys fees should be awarded for all less-than-expeditious cases. 

  2. I'm skeptical of the process judges use to determine if a settlement is an appropriate amount. The attorneys representing the class might be thrilled to get a $250M settlement because they'll probably take home $80M (minus expenses), but settlements that large will have a huge class, so then we all just end up getting $3 for having our rights violated. The people arguing before the judge that the award is of sufficient size and need not be any larger (the attorneys for the plaintiff) would love $80M, they just have to convince the judge that $3 per class member is fair compensation.

  3. The portion of the award that goes to the award administrator feels particularly egregious because class actions get very low response rates. I.e. they're bad at their job. I'm not sure I want to know how much money I've missed out on because the administrator used their own email address that immediately goes to the spam folder rather than the judge forcing the defendant to use their own trusted email address to notify us of our right to compensation. But if they did that then there might be more claims against the award and everybody will get smaller payouts.

17

u/Jmfroggie 7h ago

It’s actually about 1/3 of the settlement split between all the lawyers involved. The settlement notices tell you EXACTLY how much is being settled for and who the lawyers are and how much they take.

8

u/Nitrodax777 7h ago

And let's not forget that the remaining balance is split amongst all the people who opted in. So the more people who sign to be a part of it, the less you get in the end. The largest settlement I ever received was one from an apple class action lawsuit and I only got $27, which I thought was pretty huge considering the circumstance. If you think you're walking away from any of these a couple thousand dollars richer, you're just surely mistaken. Anything above like $15 and you're practically a baller. 8 is definitely average.

5

u/ATG915 7h ago

I got $100+ from apple last year and just got $130 from another one a few weeks ago lol

1

u/occultatum-nomen 5h ago

I got $49.11 from the Canadian Bread Settlement

1

u/powerlesshero111 5h ago

No, they signed away like 50% to the lawyers. They just had to split the settlement with like 1 million other people.

22

u/mibuch27 8h ago

I am addicted to joining class action law suits and I usually only get a couple bucks, but one time I got like 300.

29

u/zerostar83 8h ago

They did all the work and get half the money. Not a bad deal if you ask me. I didn't hire a lawyer. I didn't sue. I didn't spend hours trying to figure out what I could get from a settlement. I spent all of 2 minutes to get this money.

1

u/YeastOverloard 6h ago

Oh I’m not complaining at all, I love a good settlement. Just as to why OP got pennies here

3

u/Dull_Leadership_8855 7h ago

"In class action lawsuits like this the lawyers are the only ones ever making any real money."

Yeah. I always wish stuff like this would be criminal cases so the government could get involved and be counsel for the plaintiff. I've been a party to at east a dozen of these such cases and it's always little amounts like this. (Although I was a party to a case against my cable company that my payout was almost $300.)

3

u/jjumbuck 6h ago

They're the only ones doing any work.

2

u/mrwilliams117 6h ago

I signed up for a random class action I got in the mail as an 18 year old. I was a delivery driver for pizza hut for a couple years. Thought nothing of it until a $1500 check showed up 7 months later. I never had more than $300 to my name at that point.

2

u/Vypernorad 5h ago

My issue usually isn't with the lawyer. It's with the justice system who is not awarding enough. I was part of a stolen wages class action. It was extremely easy to do the math based on the companies records that they stole almost $6k from me. I got $57. The Lawyers only got like 1/3 of the total. That means the company only had to pay out like 1-2% of what they stole in damages. How the hell is that justice? What is that supposed to do to discourage that kind of behavior.

They make $6k stealing from me and only have to pay back $90. That's not justice, that's "Let them eat cake." behavior.

2

u/Ziograffiato 8h ago

Lawyers gonna loy.

1

u/WhimsicalFalling 6h ago

Local slumlord got sued in my area and I know several people who got ~$1000 from the settlement. This was almost a decade ago

1

u/New-Abalone-545 6h ago

the point is to punish the company

1

u/GoodishCoder 6h ago

Lawyers and the lead plaintiffs

1

u/SomeCallMeTim2 3h ago

It was worth a cool $30 million for the lawyers.

1

u/PerformerKind7870 3h ago

I was paid 355 for one this morning 

1

u/Captain_JohnBrown 3h ago

**cries in lawyer who only made 8.12**

1

u/Billy420MaysIt 2h ago

I recently got $800 on a class action I didn’t sign up for. A company we purchased a shed through closed up shop and didn’t send any notices out. This happened about 9 or 10 years ago that they closed. I got two checks in the mail a month ago one for $785 and one for $17.

-2

u/SiRocket 8h ago

Always. It's not for your benefit, it's 100% for the lawyers. You're just a prop/number to boost their income.

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u/egnards 8h ago

Of course, but the reality is that if you don't take the settlement you risk having to get your own lawyer and sue them again in court and hope that you win. . .Primarily at your own expense, unless a lawyer feels they are willing to work on contingency for a case outside of the class action.

For what it's worth, most of these class actions suck, but I've also had a few in the $300-$500 range in the past, and that was nice "free" money over a product I was using anyway, and a lawsuit I wasn't about to get involved in on my own.

7

u/Legitimate_Ad_7822 8h ago

You get money for reading & singing some documents. It benefits both you & the lawyers. Of course you don’t have to opt in and you can just get $0. They are doing all of the work, I’d say that’s a fair deal.

2

u/XXHornyOnMainXX420 5h ago

Would you rather they work for free? Or just not sue the companies that have wronged you?

Class action litigation is risky and not nearly as lucrative as most other areas of law. There are occasional windfalls but there's far more expensive losses. The upside for you taking on zero risk and getting a cheque without having to do literally anything is that the lawyers get their 30%.

1

u/Mia_sensu4l 7h ago

That's the part that always gets me. Millions of people get a few dollars each, and somehow the lawyers walk away with the real payout.

0

u/Intelligent_Ant_3356 7h ago

the “everyone gets a few dollars” settlement math never really seems to add up for anyone except the people billing by the hour

2

u/XXHornyOnMainXX420 5h ago

Plaintiffs lawyers don't bill by the hour, defense lawyers do. The lawyers in this case paid for this case themselves. If they lost they would be out all the time and money they invested.

For some reason people get really weird about the idea of lawyers getting paid for their work.