In one of the largest settlements in American history, on Thursday, September the 25th,

Amazon settled their case with the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, for staggering $2.5 billion.

And it's worth mentioning that over half of that money is actually earmarked for you, the customers,

meaning that if you are an Amazon Prime member, you can be getting

a piece of that settlement. Let me briefly give you the history of the case as well as how

you can tell whether or not you actually qualify for this money. Now, the case itself, it

originated from 2021 at the tail end of Trump's first term in office. That was when the FTC began investigating some of the

practices that Amazon was implementing in their Amazon Prime program. Specifically, at that time,

you had the former chairwoman of the FTC, Ms. Lena Khan, she accused Amazon of, quote,

using manipulative web designs to enroll tens of millions of users in Prime without

clear consent and making cancellation intentionally difficult.

The FTC claimed that Amazon used deceptive user interface designs known as dark patterns

to trick consumers into automatically enrolling and renewing Prime subscriptions. And you might have experienced something like this yourself at some point in time.

I know I have. You're trying to buy something on Amazon, and as you're going through the actual checkout process,

the system asks you whether you want free shipping on the item.

You of course do, and within just a few clicks, you don't even realize it, but suddenly

you're a member of Amazon Prime.

Here's in fact how the complaint from the FTC broke down what was happening.

In some cases, the lawsuit contends, the button presented to consumers to complete their

transaction did not clearly state that by choosing that option,

they were also agreeing to join Prime for a recurring subscription.

And then, of course, on the other side,

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