Some Canadians got a surprise e-transfer over the holidays for $36.29 from the Canadian accounting firm MNP.
It turns out the payment is tied to a recently settled class action lawsuit against Facebook. The class accused Facebook’s parent company, Meta, of using users’ images without their consent for “Sponsored Stories” to feature or advertise products.
Accounting firm MNP is administering payments for anyone who joined the class before the deadline. Nick Greenfield, MNP’s senior vice president of marketing, told Daily Hive the amount of $36.29 was calculated in accordance with the settlement.
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MNP is still processing payouts from the settlement. It’s dealing with about 875,000 claims.
Anyone who signed up to be part of the class action who hasn’t received payment yet may still have a deposit coming their way. Either that, or they entered their email address incorrectly.
If a typo corresponds to a legitimate email address, then the owner of the misspelled email may get the payment instead. Greenfield asked recipients to make sure the name on the payment matches their name.
“If they made a typographical error when entering their email, but the email address was still a valid email address, the payment would have been processed as there is no mechanism to determine whether the email entered by the claimant was actually their email,” Greenfield said.
He asked anyone who received payment in error not to deposit it, as they aren’t part of the class entitled to the payment. MNP did not say what recipients who have auto-deposit enabled should do. It also did not explain how recipients should return payments made in error.
The total value of the settlement was $51 million. It’s being paid out to the nearly one million class members who lived in four provinces at the time — British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland and Labrador. Class members had to reside in one of those provinces between January 1, 2011, and May 30, 2014, and be Facebook users to be eligible.