Amazon customers with a Prime subscription will soon be able to make claims online for their share of the $1.5 billion the company is being ordered to pay to users in the United States.

It’s all part of a recent settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission. Amazon now has to “provide $1.5 billion in refunds back to consumers harmed by their deceptive Prime enrollment practices,” according to a press release from the FTC. The total settlement with the FTC is $2.5 billion, as it includes a $1 billion penalty.

“There was no admission of guilt in this settlement by the company or any executives,” says Alisa Carroll, an Amazon spokesperson, in an email sent to WIRED on Thursday after the decision was released. “The settlement largely requires us to maintain the sign-up and cancellation process that has been in place for several years—not to make additional changes.” She says Amazon will comply with the settlement’s decision.

Who Gets the Amazon Cash?

In most cases, those who are eligible and make a claim will eventually receive $51 in total. If you’re one of the millions of Amazon Prime members in the US, odds are you’re curious about whether you can get some of these Bezos bucks. Eligibility hinges on two broad factors, according to the court order filed on Thursday.

First, the decision includes any US customers who signed up for Prime “through a Challenged Enrollment Flow” in the last six years—from June 23, 2019 to June 23, 2025, to be exact. What counts as a “challenged” sign-up process? The order says it’s “any version of the Universal Prime Decision Page, the Shipping Option Select Page, Prime Video enrollment flow, or the Single Page Checkout.”

That’s quite extensive! Unless you went directly to the Prime subscription site to enroll, you very well may have encountered multiple nudges from Amazon during the process that fall under this “challenged” sign-up umbrella.

The second group eligible to make a claim are Amazon Prime customers who started the process of canceling their subscription, but didn’t complete the cancellation. The ruling covers the same six year time period. It includes users who became frustrated with the cancellation process and quit halfway through as well as those who took a “Save Offer” that incentivized them to keep the membership for longer.

Customers who fall into either of these two groups, having enrollment or cancellation issues, are eligible to make a claim. It’s not required for you to fit into both categories to get money from the settlement.

What’s Next?

Not everyone who’s eligible will need to submit a claim to get the cash. “Some consumers will receive automatic payments in the next 90 days,” says FTC spokesperson Christopher Bissex in an email sent to WIRED. “The rest of eligible consumers will receive a notification from Amazon, and will have the opportunity to submit a simple claim form.”

Subscribers who used three or fewer of the benefits provided through Prime in a single year may receive the automatic payment, whereas more avid Prime users will need to make a claim. The specifics about what exactly counts as a single “benefit” remain vague.

WIRED will update this article as more information becomes available and detail how impacted customers will be able to make their claim with Amazon. In previous instances, like the FTC’s Equifax settlement, many of those eligible made claims through a dedicated website.

A traditional digital camera splits an image into three channels—red, green and blue—mirroring how the human eye perceives color. But those are just three discrete points along a continuous spectrum of wavelengths. Specialized “spectral” cameras go further by sequentially capturing dozens, or even hundreds, of these divisions across the spectrum.

This process is slow, however, meaning that hyperspectral cameras can only take still images, or videos with very low frame rates, or frames per second (fps). But what if a high-fps video camera could capture dozens of wavelengths at once, revealing details invisible to the naked eye?

Now, researchers at the University of Utah’s John and Marcia Price College of Engineering have developed a new way of taking a high-definition snapshot that encodes spectral data into images, much like a traditional camera encodes color. Instead of a filter that divides light into three color channels, their specialized filter divides it into 25. Each pixel stores compressed spectral information along with its spatial information, which computer algorithms can later reconstruct into a “cube” of 25 separate images—each representing a distinct slice of the visible spectrum.

This instantaneous encoding enables the researchers’ camera system—small enough to fit into a cellphone—to take high-definition video, and the compressed nature of the component images opens up new real-world applications.

A study demonstrating the camera was led by Research Assistant Professor Apratim Majumder and Professor Rajesh Menon, both in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. The results are reported in the journal Optica.

The camera’s design represents a leap forward in how spectral data can be captured.

“We introduce a compact camera that captures both color and fine spectral details in a single snapshot, producing a ‘spectral fingerprint’ for every pixel,” Menon said.

Hyperspectral cameras have long been used in agriculture, astronomy and medicine, where subtle differences in color can make a big difference. But these cameras have historically been bulky, expensive and limited to still images.

“When we started out on this research, our intention was to demonstrate a compact, fast, megapixel resolution hyperspectral camera, able to record highly compressed spatial-spectral information from scenes at video-rates, which did not exist,” Majumder said.

The Utah team’s breakthrough lies in how it captures and processes the data. The key component is a diffractive element that is placed directly over the camera’s sensor. It’s the element’s repeating nanoscale patterns that diffract incoming light and encodes both spatial and spectral information for each pixel on the sensor. By encoding the scene into a single, compact two-dimensional image rather than a massive three-dimensional data cube, the camera makes hyperspectral imaging faster and more efficient.

“One of the primary advantages of our camera is its ability to capture the spatial-spectral information in a highly compressed two-dimensional image instead of a three-dimensional data cube and use sophisticated computer algorithms to extract the full data cube at a later point,” Majumder explained. “This allows for fast, highly compressed data capture.”

The streamlined approach also cuts costs dramatically.

“Our camera costs many times less, is very compact and captures data much faster than most available commercial hyperspectral cameras,” Majumder said. “We have also shown the ability to post-process the data as per the need of the application and implement different classifiers suited to different fields such as agriculture, astronomy and bio-imaging.”

Data storage is another advantage.

“Satellites would have trouble beaming down full image cubes, but since we extract the cubes in post-processing, the original files are much smaller,” Majumder added.

To demonstrate the camera’s capabilities, the researchers tried three real-world applications: telling different types of tissue apart in a surgical scene; predicting the age of strawberries as they decayed over time; and mimicking a series of spectral filters that are used in astronomy.

The current prototype takes images at just over one megapixel in size and can break them down into 25 separate wavelengths across the spectrum. But the team is already working on improvements.

“This work demonstrates a first snapshot megapixel hyperspectral camera,” Majumder said. “Next, we are developing a more improved version of the camera that will allow us to capture images at a larger image size and increased number of wavelength channels, while also making the nano-structured diffractive element much simpler in design.”

By making hyperspectral imaging cheaper, faster, and more compact, the U engineers have opened the door for technologies that could change the way we see the world and uncover details hidden across the spectrum.

In the six-year time frame established in the settlement, anyone who “unsuccessfully attempted” to cancel their Prime subscription online is eligible to get paid up to $51 from Amazon. People who signed up for Prime during that same period can also get up to $51 if they signed up through a “challenged enrollment flow”—a page with a confusing interface that may lead to people inadvertently making a purchase. Previous court filings established that in some cases, some users may have selected “two-day shipping” on an item and not realized that, in doing so, they were also signing up for Amazon Prime.

An FTC spokesperson tells WIRED that automatic payments will go out to some customers within 90 days.

“The rest of eligible consumers will receive a notification from Amazon, and will have the opportunity to submit a simple claim form,” the FTC says. “Amazon is required to post information about this to Amazon.com and the app. The settlement also requires Amazon to have an independent third party who will monitor their compliance with these claims.”

The court filing says that Amazon is also “permanently” barred from structuring Prime sign-ups with a confusing “negative option feature” where a customer is assumed to be making a purchase unless they actively refuse it.

For example, the filing says, a button that reads “No thanks, I don’t want free shipping” does not clearly indicate that a customer will be signed up for Prime unless they click it. Amazon also has to make it obvious when a person is choosing to sign up for Prime, and include language like “Join Prime” in its user interface. Similarly, Amazon has to clearly communicate when a Prime subscription is subject to auto-renewals by using words like “renew.”

The initial complaint, which was filed by the FTC in June 2023, alleged that while Amazon had improved its process for canceling Prime memberships, the company had spent years knowingly complicating the cancellation process.

An attachment on a May 7 court filing includes an email chain with Amazon employees from December 2020, which was described as “privileged and confidential” in the subject line. In the email, a manager of Prime content and marketing paraphrased key points that came up in a recent “US prime performance meeting.”

“Subscription is driving a bit of a shady world,” reads one paraphrased quote, attributed to an unnamed person at the meeting.

“We should lean away from experimenting with sign-up clarity, and focus more on driving overall members and increasing confirmation that you are prime,” reads a different paraphrased quote from another person at the meeting, included in the same attachment.

A different attachment shows that Amazon was aware that customers were frustrated. A company slide presentation dated September 17, 2017, focused specifically on customer service complaints about “unintentional” Prime sign-ups. (A different attachment, which includes an email chain dated September 25, 2017, appears to refer to the presentation. Two dozen people were asked to “delete the PowerPoint document” and send “confirmation” once they had.)

One customer complaint in the presentation claims that they were “tricked” into signing up for a free trial for Amazon Prime when they selected two-day shipping on a purchase, not knowing that this would also sign them up for a trial for Prime.

“I DO NOT LIKE YOUR SERVICE,” reads another complaint. “THIS IS CRAP THAT I ORDERED A PRODUCT IN AMAZON ADS [sic] ME TO A PROGRAM WITH AUTO BILLING THAT I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR. I WILL NOT USE AMAZON AND TELL EVERYONE ABOUT THIS TYPE OF CRAP YOU ARE PULLING.”

“IT IS SNEAKY AND BLOODY DISHONEST FORCING SOMETHING THE [sic] I NEVER WANTED,” reads another complaint.

The same Amazon slide presentation noted that confusing Prime sign-ups were leading to an increased burden on Amazon’s customer service workers, as well as a “loss of customer trust.”