A company you’ve never heard of may owe you money if you’ve ever used Venmo, Robinhood, more

A company you’ve likely never heard of may owe you money if you’ve ever used Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, American Express, or any other financial app that uses a company called Plaid to link the app to your bank account …

Fast Company reports that Plaid was accused in a class action lawsuit of collecting more financial data than needed, and using deception to do so.

Plaid allegedly obtained “more financial data than was needed” and set up log-in pages that deceptively mimicked those of the user’s own bank account, but fed the credentials directly to itself. For its part, Plaid has denied any wrongdoing and argued it was transparent about its practices.

Despite denying the allegations, the company has agreed to an out-of-court settlement.

As a result, it will pay $58 million to all those consumers who have linked a bank account to any of Plaid’s 5,500-plus client apps, which include popular services like American Express, Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, and Betterment.

Most large-scale class action lawsuits result in lawyers earning millions, and victims receiving a few dollars. This one doesn’t look set to be an exception, with the settlement split across tens of millions of claimants using thousands of apps.

All the same, if you want to check your eligibility and submit a claim, you can do so online. You’ll need to be a US resident who had a consumer bank account linked to an app that used Plaid between January 1, 2013, and November 19, 2021.

You can search for apps that used Plaid during the relevant period, and then submit your claim here. The lawyers warn that settlement may take a year or more.

Payments for valid claims will be made after the Settlement becomes final by the means designated on your claim form. You may select payment via PayPal, Venmo, ACH Transfer, or paper check. The Settlement will become final only if, and after, Final Approval is granted by the Court and any appeals to Final Approval of the Settlement are resolved. This process may take longer than one year. Please be patient.

Plaid says that it has since changed the way it operates to be more transparent and conservative in the information collected.

Via Engadget. Photo: Venmo.