If You’ve Ever Purchased a Galaxy S4 in the US, Samsung Owes You $10

If you’ve ever purchased a Samsung Galaxy S4 and you live in the U.S., the company that made the device may owe you $10.

Back in 2013, Samsung was caught cheating on benchmark scores. Basically, the company implemented a mechanism that would detect when benchmark software was being run on a Galaxy S4.

When it did, it would force the Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU to use all four processor cores and would artificially increase processing speed from the standard 480MHz to 532MHz.

Just about a year later, Daniel Norcia filed a class-action lawsuit against Samsung alleging that the company was misleading customers about the power of its devices.

Samsung, for its part, has never actually denied cheating. Instead, its defense is largely that it wasn’t “legally obliged” to tell customers that its smartphone cheated on benchmarks.

Over the past five years, Samsung has continued fighting the allegations in a case that made it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Now, Samsung has officially agreed to settle the case and pay out $13.4 million to affected parties, The Register reported. That breaks down to $2.8 million for settlement costs and $10.6 million for injunctive relief.

That means that if you’ve ever purchased a Samsung Galaxy S4, the South Korean tech giant owes you $10. In fact, you may be receiving an email pretty soon allowing you to collect that part of the settlement.

Of course, that’s dependent on whether or not you gave your email when purchasing the device. It also assumes that you still use that account (or at least have access to it).

If you didn’t provide an email during the time of purchase or no longer have access to the account, you’ll need to pick up a physical USA Today newspaper for the next coming Mondays. The details of the settlement will appear in the publication’s Money section or its Legal Notices.

Also as a result of the settlement, Samsung has promised not to include any type of software mechanism that will artificially boost performance during benchmark testing — at least until 2024.

After that, it could theoretically continue to cheat on benchmark tests. But that would probably result in more consumer outrage and legal action.