Equifax victims unlikely to get $125 due to ‘overwhelming’ response

Victims of Equifax’s 2017 data breach will get nowhere near the $125 each that was originally promised — with regulators admitting on Wednesday that they haven’t set aside enough cash to meet an “overwhelming” response.

Some 4.5 million people have visited the Federal Trade Commission’s website since the agency last week announced a $700 million settlement over the hacking disaster that compromised the personal information of 147 million Americans.

While the settlement calls for as much as $425 million to be set aside for consumers who were affected by the breach, most of that cash pile was allocated for free credit monitoring. Only $31 million, meanwhile was set aside for cash payments.

Accordingly, “each person who takes the money option is going to get a very small amount,” according to the FTC. “Nowhere near the $125 they could have gotten if there hadn’t been such an enormous number of claims filed.”

The rush to get in on the cash option comes as the settlement spread like wildfire on the internet — including by politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who may have inadvertently pushed down the amount that people will actually get.

For victims to get the originally promised $125, the response would have had to have been limited to 248,000 people, or about a sixth of 1% of the victims.

With at least 4.5 million already clamoring for the cash option, the implied payout for each respondent currently stands at $6.89 and falling.

To make matters worse, the FTC’s offer of free credit monitoring for four years might not be much of a deal, as credit monitoring “is of limited effectiveness in preventing identity theft,” said Chi Chi Wu, a staff attorney for the National Consumer Law Center.

“The settlement figures were determined by the regulators, not Equitax,” Wyatt Jefferies, a spokesman for the company, told The Post. Reps for the FTC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which also settled with the company, didn’t return requests for comment.