The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently settled a lawsuit it brought against Amazon in 2023 related to Amazon enrolling millions of customers as Amazon Prime members and then making it difficult for those customers to cancel their Amazon Prime subscriptions.  As a result of the settlement, Amazon is required to pay a $1 billion civil penalty to the FTC and pay an addition $1.5 billion in refunds to affected customers.  Anyone in the United States who enrolled in Prime between June 23, 2019 and June 23, 2015 through what the FTC referred to as “challenged enrollment flows” or who tried unsuccessfully to cancel their Prime membership during that time is eligible for a refund capped at $51.  No action need be taken by affected customers to receive their refund.  Eligible Prime customers will receive an email between November 12th and December 24th informing the customers of the choice to get their refund by PayPal or Venmo. Customers who would prefer a check can merely ignore the email and a check will be sent to the default shipping address on their Prime subscription.

TIPS

As always, scammers will be taking advantage of the refund program and contacting people posing as Amazon asking for a cash payment in order to receive their refund or asking for username and passwords for your Amazon account.  The real refund program does not require any payment to be made in order to be eligible for or apply for the refund.  Nor will you be asked for your username and password. Only scammers will do so.  Providing that information to a scammer will result in the scammer being able to access your Amazon account.  This is probably a good time, if you have not done so already, to sign up for dual factor authentication for your Amazon account so that even if a scammer obtained your Amazon username and password, they would not be able to access your account.

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