Former Yahoo users who live in the U.S. and Israel are able to obtain compensation for the numerous hacks the company experienced between 2012 and 2016 as part of a court settlement.

Putting an exact figure on the amount that can be claimed, however, is not simple. In theory, victims can claim up to $358.80 in compensation, but as The Register pointed out Wednesday, to do so requires victims to remember their Yahoo address and also have credit monitoring and answer five questions.

In reality, $100 in compensation is on offer, but even then a claim still requires proof of two years of credit monitoring to file the claim to begin with.

The settlement, first proposed in April, includes a minimum of $55 million for victims’ out-of-pocket expenses, $24 million to pay for two years of crediting monitoring service, as much as $30 million for legal expenses and an additional $8.5 million for unspecified expenses.

The irony, in the final settlement, is that to claim compensation victims already have to have paid for a credit monitoring service.

Yahoo, once a giant in the tech industry, is a company that in 2020 only exists in name after being acquired by Verizon Communications in 2017.

Although Yahoo is no longer a standalone company, its hacking will be remembered for years to come because they remain the biggest data breaches of all time. There was one hack of 500 million users, and another hack involved 3 billion users being compromised. To put that in perspective, there are 7.53 billion people in the world, meaning that almost 40% of the entire planet had its data stolen from Yahoo.

Victims of the hack, albeit only those from the U.S. and Israel, can make their claims for compensation from the Yahoo breach settlement website here. The deadline to make a claim is July 20.

Photo: yodelanecdotal/Flickr