Start in Newburgh, New York, in a building called the Kenney Apartments, where more than 100 low-income tenants spent stretches of several winters without heat or hot water, among pest infestations, mold, sewage leaks, broken windows and a leaking roof. The state attorney general's office sued. The settlement returns $409,697 to those tenants as a rent abatement for the months they lived in it, requires the owners to make the repairs, and puts them on monthly progress reports. A further $100,000 penalty hangs over them only if they violate the agreement. [1]
Divide the abatement by the tenants and the ceiling is a little over $4,000 a head, for winters no one can give back.
Second: 23 Denny's restaurants across Western New York, owned not by the chain but by franchise companies belonging to an Arizona couple. New York's spread-of-hours law says a worker whose day spans more than ten hours is owed an extra hour at minimum wage. More than 20,000 such shifts since 2019 went unpaid. The settlement returns $440,000 to more than 1,900 workers, with the franchisees paying another $40,000 for the administrator so none of it comes out of the workers' share, and no unclaimed money reverting to the owners. "Denny's workers kept these restaurants running through long days and late nights," the attorney general said, "and they deserve to be paid every dollar they earned." [2] About $22 a missed shift; roughly $230 apiece on average, though individual checks vary with shifts worked.
Third, the ugliest of the four: telemarketing call centers that phoned distressed homeowners, implied they were connected to federal COVID-19 mortgage-relief programs, and took mortgage payments from people trying to save their houses. A joint FTC and California action shut it down; a 2024 federal court order banned the operators. This month the money went out: nearly $3 million to more than 1,800 homeowners, about half of them Californians, roughly $1,600 each. [3]
Fourth, the widest: 62,893 people who cleaned houses and did handyman jobs through the Handy app, now Angi Services. The FTC's case was that the platform advertised earnings most workers could not actually expect, and did not clearly disclose the fees and fines it withheld from their pay. More than $2.7 million has now been mailed back, about $43 each. [4]
Forty-three dollars is not life-changing. It is also exactly the point: it is the amount that was quietly taken, returned to the person it was taken from, 62,893 times.
A precision on the two federal figures. The agencies describe them as "nearly $3 million" and "more than $2.7 million," and we could not fetch the FTC's own pages, which blocked us; the numbers here come from the California regulator that co-brought the case and from the reporting of the distribution. [3][4] The two New York figures are exact, from the attorney general's own releases.
Add the people: something over 66,000, in ten days, across four cases. None of them will describe this as the system working. It is, though, the part of it that sends checks.
