Are you getting a $5,000 check from AT&T?

AT&T customers who were victims of a data breach are about to get a check from the carrier funded by a $177 million class-action settlement made by the company. Typically, the attorneys are the only ones who make any serious coin in a class-action suit, but some of the checks being cut could be for as much as $5,000.

A class-action suit is one where one or more individuals sue a defendant on behalf of a larger number of people who have suffered the same injury. In this case, the members of the class were all AT&T subscribers who were affected by two data breaches that took place in 2024.

AT&T funded the settlement over the March 2024 data breach with $149 million

One of the breaches took place in March 2024, and that one led to a $149 million settlement. A second breach in July 2024 led to a $28 million settlement. On October 2, final approval for the deal was granted by a federal court.

When AT&T will distribute the checks due to those impacted by the first breach

As long as no appeals are filed, on November 12 it all becomes effective and by law, the payments will have to be sent within the next 60 days. That means the checks should be distributed no later than January 11, 2027.

Those receiving the $5,000 checks had to prove that the data breach left them with documented out-of-pocket losses of that amount related to the March data breach.

Among the customer data leaked because of the breach were subscribers':

• Social Security numbers
• Addresses
• Account passcodes

The March 2024 breach impacted over 7.6 million active account holders and 65.4 million former customers. Just about all AT&T cellular customers were victimized by the second breach.

The July 2024 breach featured data that was part of call and text interaction logs that were exposed revealing phone numbers, interaction counts, call durations, and some cell tower IDs from May to October 2022. This data had been stored on a third-party cloud platform.

Thankfully, Social Security numbers were not part of the exposed package of data. Members of this class could be eligible to receive a maximum of $2,500.

Court filings indicated that the July 2024 data breach resulted in some victims having their bank accounts drained and fraudulent loans taken out in their names.


Thus far, there have been 4.9 million claims submitted, and 3 million of them were approved. 1.1 million claims were rejected for being duplicates, fraudulent, withdrawn, or from ineligible business accounts.

If you didn't file a claim before this date, it is too late to expect a check from AT&T

If you did not file a claim and were hoping to do so, forget it. The deadline to file was December 18, 2025. While the carrier did agree to the settlement, it did so to avoid a trial, but it never admitted to any wrongdoing.

Where you can get more information about the settlement

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