(NEXSTAR) – Half a million hopefuls waiting for a check from the massive $725 million Facebook privacy settlement received a rejection letter over the past couple of weeks.
The huge payout, which Facebook parent company Meta agreed to in order to settle claims it violated users' privacy by sharing their data with third parties, was given final approval by a judge in San Francisco last month.
Meanwhile, the company administering the settlement fund, Angeion, is working to verify the 28 million claims it received.
“As far as we can tell that’s the largest number of claims ever filed in a class action in the United States,” Lesley Weaver, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the case, said in court.
Angeion is still working through the pile of applications, but a representative for the company told Nexstar about 17 million have been validated so far.
As the company checks each application, some are thrown out because they appear to be fraudulent. About 500,000 such claims have been rejected so far, Angeion said.
Those who were rejected still have hope. Your application may have been incorrectly flagged as fraudulent because the username you provided didn't match what Facebook had on file, you may have provided an email address other than the one associated with your Facebook account, your phone number might not have matched, among other errors, Angeion said.
People whose claims were rejected received an email directly notifying them. You may want to check your inbox and spam folders to see if you received such a notice because you only have 10 days to appeal the rejection from the date of the email.
Instructions on how to appeal a rejection are in the email sent by "Facebook Consumer Privacy Settlement Administrator." You'll need to fill out a form online to correct or clarify information on file.
Even if you weren't among the 500,000 recently rejected, you may want to keep an eye out for such an email. Angeion still has millions of claims to pore through, and yours could be among them.
While the settlement was granted approval, the court still needs to deal with pending appeals before payments can be sent to an estimated 23 million or more Americans whose claims are eventually verified.
Not everyone will receive the same sized payment – the longer you had a Facebook account, the more money you qualify for – but lawyers for the plaintiffs estimated the median check will be around $30.