Threat Level reports:
A central element to the agreement is a provision giving affected customers a one-year subscription to spam-blocking software. The Trend Micro Internet Security Pro retails for about $70. TD Ameritrade said it struck a deal with Trend Micro to service the settlement agreement for about $6 million, the parties told Walker in court briefs on Friday. A solution for those using Apple computers was added to the deal.
In all, lawyers in the case said Ameritrade is likely to spend $10 million on the deal. With attorney’s fees, the deal is expected to run the Nebraska company $12 million, or about $2 for every affected customer covered by the lawsuit.1
There’s no evidence that anyone’s identity was actually stolen in the data theft at the root of the suit. So, it’s probably not a terrible deal.
And then it gets interesting:
In an unusual twist, lead plaintiff Matthew Elvey, an IT computer consultant who signed the agreement, now says it’s not good for customers and that he was “threatened” by his lawyers into signing it.2
Sounds like this suit could become “fun.”
Footnotes
- David Kravets, Ameritrade Hack Settlement: $2 Per Victim, $1.8 Million for Lawyers | Threat Level from Wired.Com, Wired (2008), https://web.archive.org/web/20080713150556/http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/ameritrade-hack.html (last visited Jul 11, 2008). ↩︎
- Id. ↩︎
About the Author
Mickey is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.
