How To Avoid Falling for Capital One Data Breach Settlement Email Scams

Capital One, which provides a variety of financial services, suffered a major data breach that affected millions of its customers. The customers took the bank to court, accusing it of failing to protect their information. Are Capital One data breach settlement emails a scam or legit?

The Capital One breach compromised the information of about 98 million U.S. customers. The exposed data include people’s name, birthdate, Social Security number, contacts, and credit score. The class-action lawsuit asserted that the breach put the affected customers at risk of identity theft and fraud.

The data breach brought many problems to Capital One. In addition to customers hitting it with a class-action lawsuit, the top U.S. banking industry regulator slapped Capital One with an $80 million fine for failing to adequately protect its customers’ information.

The bank agreed to pay $190 million to settle the class-action lawsuit, though it maintained that it made no mistake in the massive breach. The bank’s data that was compromised was stored in Amazon’s cloud environment. The hacker, Paige Thompson, was arrested.

The bank was required to send a notice of the settlement to affected customers, and malicious parties seem to have taken advantage of this.

If you’ve received an email about the settlement and you're a Capital One customer, it may be difficult to tell whether it’s real without testing it first. You could open it to see the content, but be careful not to click any links in it.

Instead of opening links directly in the email, copy the URL and open the website in a separate tab. You can now enter the code or PIN you received in the email to see if it works on the claim website. If it works, the email may be legit. At this point, it might also be a good idea to contact Capital One directly to check the authenticity of the email.

The settlement seeks to compensate customers for the losses related to the data breach, such as expenses accrued while trying to prevent identity theft or fraud. If you’re part of Capital One data breach class-action lawsuit, you need to submit your claim for the settlement payment by Aug. 22, 2022. You may receive a settlement amount of up to $25,000.