How Has Equifax Responded To The Data Rbeach

(CNN)If you are among the 147 1000000 Americans who had their credit information exposed by the 2017 Equifax breach, the deadline to file a merits is approaching quickly.

The borderline to file a claim is Wednesday, January 22. Equifax has a data breach settlement page setup where yous tin can file a claim, and the company gear up a website to run into if your data was exposed.

You'll get 'nowhere near' the full $125 from Equifax, the FTC says

In 2017, Equifax, ane of 3 major credit reporting bureaus, had its database breached, exposing millions of names, addresses, birthdays and Social Security numbers. This opened upward millions of Americans to the possibility of identity theft.

The Federal Merchandise Commission ordered Equifax to pay $700 million in individual compensation and civil penalties, the largest settlement always to exist paid for a data breach. Equifax also had to pay $275 meg in ceremonious penalties and other bounty to 48 states, Washington, Puerto Rico and the Consumer Fiscal Protection Bureau, and the company was ordered to change how it handles private user data.

If y'all had your personal data exposed, you lot are entitled to 10 years of gratuitous credit monitoring, or you tin choose to receive a $125 payout. However, the FTC requires users to verify their claim by proving they had a credit monitoring service in place at the time they filed for a merits and that it would remain in place for six months after filing.

People that had to spend time and money to recover from the breach may exist able to claim upwards to $twenty,000, if they can prove that they took a hitting to a higher place $125.

What happens if you don't claim your $125 Equifax money? You lose it -- and your chance to sue in the future

Unfortunately, if you already filed a claim for the $125 payout or plan to before the deadline, don't await to get much. Merely $31 million of the settlement money will be used for the payouts, which could shrink that $125 payout considerably depending on how many people filed for a claim.

The FTC has urged consumers to choose the complimentary credit monitoring instead of opting for the cash payout.

"A large number of claims for greenbacks instead of credit monitoring means merely i thing: each person who takes the money option will wind up but getting a small amount of money," said Robert Schoshinski, assistant managing director for the FTC's division of privacy and identity protection. "Nowhere near the $125 they could have gotten if there hadn't been such an enormous number of claims filed."

CNN'due south Ryan Prior, Victoria Cavaliere, Brian Fung and Clare Duffy contributed to this report.