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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're going to wrap up our show for today by talking about class action lawsuits, but in a different way than you might expect. One, you may be entitled to some money from some class action lawsuit that's going on right now that you may not even know about. You may not come away with a huge payout, but who doesn't want an extra $20 here and there if you can get it, right? Getting it might actually be easier than you think. My guest is Andy Vasoyan, a freelance journalist covering technology and culture, and former Weekend Edition host for KCLU out in California. His latest piece for WIRED is titled "I Joined Every Class Action Lawsuit I Could Find, and So Can You." Andy, thank you for joining us today. Welcome to WNYC.

Andy Vasoyan: Thanks, Brian. Happy to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your stories along these lines, too, if you have any. Have you gotten money from a class action settlement? How much did you get? What was the process like? Did you get one of those emails or letters in the mail saying your name has been mentioned? You may be eligible—blah, blah, blah. 212-433-WNYC. If anyone has a story or a question, 212-433-9692, call or text. Andy, what let you down this road?

Andy Vasoyan: I was actually party to a class action litigation in 2016 related to the Aliso Canyon gas leak, which was actually the worst climate disaster in US history at the time. That was obviously a very serious case. There were roughly 36,000 plaintiffs involved at the time. As that process progressed, and it took around seven years, I was keeping track of it in my email. I just started using settlement as sort of like a search heuristic to find the emails more easily because there were a number of them.

Eventually, that led me to bump into another email in my inbox, Mansour v. Bumble Trading, Inc. That was the name of the case where I was actually part of another class action against the dating app Bumble, if you'll believe that. Then all of a sudden, I was found out that I was owed X amount of money or I was eligible to receive if the case proceeded according to how they hoped. Then I started searching settlements again, and I realized that I actually had a number of class action emails just hidden from my spam filter or lost in the press of emails, including one that had dated all the way back to 2012, so there are quite a few back there.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, your list, it's quite a wide spectrum. You've been involved in suits against big companies such as Google, but you mentioned one of the stranger ones, the dating app Bumble, also the Clif Bar & Company. How did you wind up as a litigant in a class action suit against Bumble? Did you, like, have a bad date that you somehow traced to the app?

Andy Vasoyan: The history of that is that I didn't do anything besides use their product. Part of it is that a number of these settlements are based on state legislation. California, as well as Illinois and some of the other states, have particularly detailed litigation. Laws regarding what you can and can't do with data, or in this case, with Bumble, discrimination. The case was actually that Bumble was discriminating against their male users when women were messaging first. That's their entire model.

Obviously, Bumble never admitted wrongdoing, but they settled that case. I really don't do anything, and that's part of the point of the piece, is that you interested parties don't necessarily have to. I've never spoken to a lawyer about any of these besides the original Canyon gas leak case. You just check your email and as long as you're part of the class, because America's system is opt out, you are included in that class. Until you start opting out, you are eligible, and then you can just fill out the form online.

Brian Lehrer: You have to fill out the form if you expect a check in the mail, right?

Andy Vasoyan: Absolutely, yes. It's relatively simple. Many of these are what they call no proof, so just attest that you are, in fact, you did receive the service X or Y, and you're good to go.

Brian Lehrer: I think Dawn in Park Slope has a question about some of these that he's seen in his inbox. Dawn, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Dawn: Hi. It's really not so much my inbox. It's in the mail. I've been getting a lot over the past couple of years, and it always seems to generally have to do with hacking related to different companies, maybe stock holdings or something. I never really know what to do. I cannot believe how much hacking is going on. It just amazes me. I've never really filled out a form. Our forms always-- Do they always come with the letter or the email?

Brian Lehrer: Dawn, thank you. I think, to be clear, tell me if you think I'm right about this, Andy, that Dawn is actually talking about a different category of letter, ones that inform people that they are in some really large group whose personal information has been compromised in the hack of a company. That might be a finance company or an insurance company or lots of other kinds of companies that might have your basic data. Then you can sometimes accept an offer to get some kind of privacy protection service for a period of time or something like that. Are you aware of those, and are they a different thing than what you're writing about in these articles?

Andy Vasoyan: Those are essentially a subcategory of this broader class action or mass action sector. What could be happening here is that depending on the form that they're getting, they could be getting a notification to go online because a lot of these have websites, admittedly a little, I don't want to say scammy-looking, but they look a little unofficial maybe. Some people might not be comfortable with the UI. You can go to that website, and then as part of a class action settlement related to a breach, you could sign up for this identity verification or all that sort of thing.

Part of what I write about in the piece is that if it's hard for people to know, right? They get these things, and they're just like, what even is this? A lot of people might consider it a scam or not worth their time. The crazy thing about the data in particular is that a huge, huge number of the cases are data-related and the class sizes are gigantic, because a lot of these social media companies, or large internet companies, et cetera, et cetera, have very, very large user bases. There's one example in particular with Facebook, related to the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, where there were more than 250 million users in that class. That's basically every American with a Facebook account.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes in a text message, "I got $5 from Fandango from an email about litigation. They could have at least covered a single movie ticket, but I'll take it. Another listener writes, and I think this is an important question, "In this era of pervasive phone, digital and mail scams, what is a quick, trustworthy way to verify that solicitations to join class action suits are actually real?"

Andy Vasoyan: That's a really great question, and I think a lot of people are interested in finding out that exact same thing. There's a number of groups online, on Reddit, on Facebook, for example. One that I used relatively frequently has like 35,000 members. People post multiple times every day, asking, is X or Y legit? That's one of the better ways to go about it. Some of the bigger ones will be reported on by small sites that track these sorts of things as well, so just a quick Google, is X or Y settlement legit? That should get you there relatively quickly.

Brian Lehrer: Christina in Jersey City wants to start a class action lawsuit. Is that right, Christina? Hi, you're on WNYC.

Christina: That is right. Thank you so much. I'm such a fan. I'm so happy to talk to you. Yes, this is for your guest. I used to drive for Uber, and when you're driving around, especially in New Jersey, there's tolls every one mile. What would happen is I would pay the toll, but they would charge a $50 fee every time you went over. It could be a 50-cent toll, but if that took you over so that you were in the negative, then you got a $50 fee, and they wouldn't let you keep a backup card on file.

Like in New York, even if you have like fees, you have to pay. If you put a card on, they'll let you have a new card. I ended up raking up like thousands of dollars of fees for New Jersey's E-ZPass. I tried to reach out to the attorney general. No one ever got back to me. I think that that's a terrible practice, like they're setting people up, especially if you're driving for a living, they're setting people up to get these enormous fees.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks for tipping people off to that too. At very least, keep your card up to date, so you don't get victimized the way Christina did, if her story is exactly accurate, but what can she do? Andy, is this in the scope of your story at all?

Andy Vasoyan: It is in the broad sense that if there are any lawyers listening, and I can't imagine that there aren't, I'm sure some of them have had their ears perked up by this. There is sort of a class action to lawyer pipeline that exists a number of these ads, and they do place ads for this, because the United States is one of the few, or I can't say few, but is one of the countries that does allow lawyers to advertise their services. A number of other countries do not.

You might come across ads for lawyers specifically related to class actions, and then you get funneled into to their firm, and they fire up the process. I'm sure if some lawyer reaches out, this could be viable, and maybe they'll reach out for something called a multidistrict litigation, or a mass tort, which is the more modern version of class actions that have popped up as a result of a number of Supreme Court decisions that have made class actions a little out of vogue.

Brian Lehrer: Well, good luck with that, Christina, and thanks for at least alerting our listeners to that risk. You can't necessarily make a living from signing up for all these class action lawsuits that you may be eligible to get a few dollars from, but you did write about talking to a woman who has made $8,000 since 2023 just from these suits. That's kind of real money. Not everyone is eligible for every class action lawsuit. How did you figure out, and if somebody else wants to do what you did, how can they figure out which lawsuits you can join and which ones you can't?

Andy Vasoyan: That, I think, is the number one question that people ask and are asking on the internet as well. Am I eligible? Am I eligible? The best way to do that is there's a number of these third-party sites that aggregate the huge number of ongoing cases. I don't necessarily want to advertise for them, but any sort of variant for top class action or class actions, just go to their website. The links are in my piece if you want to follow up.

They have a huge assortment, and they'll tell you what your eligibility requirements are. They'll say proof required, need X or Y receipts. They'll say no proof required. They'll say complicated like proof required. You have to demonstrate harm, for example, on some of the, let's say, healthcare-related one. There are these sites that are very, and they're pretty aggressive about getting out there as well.

Brian Lehrer: We will leave it there with Andy Vasoyan. You can read his story, "I Joined Every Class Action Lawsuit I Could Find, and So Can You" in WIRED. Andy, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

Andy Vasoyan: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. That's our show for today. Except, we say goodbye today to our intern from this school year, Henry Saringer, from the New York City public high school called the Institute for Collaborative Education. An interesting year to be at a school that goes by the acronym ICE. Henry has contributed so many good segment ideas and writing, including in the class action segment we just did, which he produced. He's generally been a good egg, with a good head and a good heart. Henry, we hope you got to learn a lot as an intern. Really, we hope you got as much out of the experience as we got from having you around. Thank you, Henry Saringer, and good luck in the future.

That's The Brian Lehrer Show for today, produced by Lisa Allison, Mary Croak, Amina Cerna, Carl Boisrand, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen produces our daily politics podcast. We had Juliana Fonda and Milton Ruiz at the audio controls. Megan Ryan is the head of Live Radio. For those of you interested, you can tune in tonight at 7:00, or watch New York One on Spectrum Cable, when I will be one of the moderators in the Democratic mayoral primary debate. Then we will replay much of the debate on tomorrow's show. At the end of tomorrow's show, a little before noon, take your reactions to what you heard. Talk to you then. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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