The way this is going is almost poetic. Amazon made its name with easy shopping, one-click checkout, and subscriptions that almost sign themselves. Now, the company is sending refund checks to customers who say they couldn’t get out. July 27 is the last day to file a claim in the company’s $2.5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. If you signed up for Prime between June 23, 2019, and June 23, 2025, you may be eligible for a payment of up to $51.
The settlement comes from a lawsuit the FTC brought in 2023. The FTC said that Amazon signed people up for Prime memberships through pages that were meant to be confusing, and then made it hard to cancel. As most companies do, Amazon said it did nothing wrong and that it has always worked to make cancellation “clear and simple.” After three days of the trial, they still reached a deal. It was a win for the FTC. Amazon said it was time to move on.
This is the second round of payments. People didn’t have to do anything to get the first one, which was sent out automatically between November and December of last year. This time is different. Customers who are eligible must file a claim on their own, either online or by emailing a fully filled-out form to the settlement address. People who are eligible should have gotten a notice in the mail or by email, but it’s worth checking to see how many of those got lost in spam or were mistaken for junk.
It all comes down to two things. First, there was the sign-up window: you had to have joined Prime within the six-year time frame. This means that either you tried to cancel your membership at that time but failed, or you signed up through what the court documents call a “challenged enrollment flow.” That includes some pages on Amazon’s site, like the page with shipping options during checkout, a checkout flow with only one page, and the page where you sign up for Prime Video. It seemed easier to sign up than to leave those pages.
Also, there is a usage limit. People who have only used their Prime benefits ten times or less in any twelve-month period after signing up can file in this round. Which, in a way, makes sense. The idea was that the people who felt trapped but didn’t use the service much were probably the ones who were hurt the most. One the other hand, it’s easy to see people who regularly used Prime benefits but still felt they couldn’t cancel being outside of this window.
The math behind one-time payments isn’t very interesting. Up to $51, depending on how much you paid in membership fees when you signed up. That’s enough food for some people for a month. For some, it’s not even enough to fill up a gas tank. But the total amount of money given back to customers—$1.5 billion—tells a different story. This is the second-highest amount of money the FTC has ever received in restitution. It’s not a rounding mistake. You can tell how many people were caught in the same thing by that.
Amazon has thirty days to look over every claim that is sent in. By September, approved payments should have been sent out. The settlement site says that the online portal is the fastest way to get there.
It’s still not clear how many customers who are eligible will actually file before the end of the month. The problem with settlements like this is that people are always aware of them. There is money there. The process doesn’t seem too hard to understand. Time is the thing that is running out.
