The Federal Trade Commission is still sending out checks to victims of a credit card fraud in the 1990s.
On Tuesday, the FTC said it is mailing some 322,000 checks totaling nearly $9.7 million to people who were victims of an illegal credit card billing scam all the way back in 1998.
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This is the third round of checks it has sent to consumers related to this case. It has taken so long because the scammers hid the money offshore and it was difficult to track down.
Apparently, nearly two decades ago, the scammers billed people for online adult entertainment they never wanted or ordered. According to the lawsuit filed by the FTC in 1999, the scammers did this by buying lists of credit card numbers from a bank in California. A lot of people caught up in the scam didn’t even own a computer at the time.
This proved quite lucrative and the scammers pulled in $49 million in sales a year. However, as the court found, some 90% of these supposed sales were fraudulent and the defendants were charged $37.5 million in damages.
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If you’re among the lucky few to get a check in the mail, it probably won’t be for much. The average amount is just $30. But it’s still something for a scam you’d probably long forgotten about.
The FTC also mailed out checks that totaled $16 million in 2009 and 2010.
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Original article published on Forbes.com.
