Jack's Family Restaurants Will Pay Every Valid Claim in Full — $55 Without a Receipt, Up to $4,080 With One — Because This Employee Payroll Breach Settlement Has No Fund and No Cap.

The people who got this notice did not eat at Jack's; they worked there. The agreement's own history is specific: on or about August 10, 2025, Jack's “became aware of suspicious activity within its platform used to store confidential data belonging to its current and former employees,” and the investigation found that intruders had been inside since July 24, 2025. What was taken is the full identity-theft kit plus the one item that makes this a payroll case: “bank account information for direct deposit of wages.” Notice letters started going out in October 2025; law-firm reports from that month say the company disclosed the incident to the Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire attorneys general on October 21, 2025 and offered twelve months of TransUnion monitoring at the time — we have not seen those filings ourselves.

Amanda Cravey filed the first federal case on October 24, 2025. Five more followed in November — Weston, Curl, Tanner, Moye and Collins, Wilson — and on February 10, 2026 the court consolidated them under the caption above. A consolidated complaint filed March 27, 2026 pleads negligence, negligence per se, breach of implied contract, breach of fiduciary duty, unjust enrichment and a request for injunctive relief; a separate state case, Murphy v. Jack's Family Restaurants, LP, sits in Jefferson County. The settlement resolves the federal action for “all persons residing in the United States whose Private Information was compromised by the Data Incident, including all persons who were sent notice.”

One thing the 83-page filing never says is how many people that is. Neither does the notice or the FAQ. We looked; the number is not there, and we are not going to estimate it from the store count.

Cash Payment A — Documented Losses: up to $4,000 for out-of-pocket losses caused by the breach, on third-party documentation and an attestation under penalty of perjury. The notice lists unreimbursed bank and card charges, the cost of replacing a driver's license or Social Security number, credit reports, and credit monitoring or identity-theft protection bought between July 24, 2025 and the claims deadline “primarily because of the Data Incident.” Self-prepared documents can support a claim but cannot carry it. A rejected or uncured Payment A claim is not thrown out: the agreement says it “will be converted to Cash Payment C.”

Cash Payment B — Lost Time: $20 an hour for up to four hours, $80, on your own attestation of time spent responding — no receipts. Leave the hours blank and the administrator may read it as one hour. B can be claimed alone or on top of A, which is where the $4,080 ceiling comes from.

Cash Payment C — Alternative Cash Payment: $55, no documentation of any kind. Here the paperwork has a wrinkle. The opening of paragraph 69 and the FAQ say C is instead of A and B; sub-paragraph (c) of the same section says C may be elected “in addition to or in lieu of Cash Payment B.” The claim form resolves it in the administrator's favour: under Section V it says “Do not select this box if you elected Cash Payment A or Cash Payment B.” So the real menu is $55 with nothing, or $80 with an attestation of four hours, or documented losses plus the $80. The form also describes the $55 as a payment “estimated to be $55.00” — the agreement gives it as a fixed amount, and we can find no mechanism in it that would change the figure.

Read side by side with the Globe Life settlement announced the same week — $3.4 million cap, cut pro rata if exceeded, $72 the most anyone gets without receipts — the Jack's structure is the opposite. Paragraph 70 of the agreement: “Defendant shall be solely responsible for causing to be paid all valid Claims for the benefits of Settlement Class Members including Cash Payments and any benefits set forth above.” There is no settlement amount, no cap, and no pro rata clause anywhere in the document. Every valid $55 claim is $55.

The costs on top of the claims are also Jack's: attorneys' fees of up to $351,000 plus reasonable costs to William B. Federman of Federman & Sherwood, the court-appointed class counsel; service awards of $2,500 to each class representative, paid from an escrow account the administrator sets up; and settlement administration, for which Jack's deposits $75,000 with Simpluris within 21 days of preliminary approval and then pays monthly invoices, with anything unspent returned to the company. None of it reduces what a claimant receives, because there is nothing to reduce.

The credit monitoring is the one benefit that works the other way from Globe Life: it is not automatic. Three years of CyEx Financial Shield Complete — one-bureau monitoring, dark-web scanning, identity restoration and $1,000,000 of identity-theft insurance with no deductible — is available to every class member, but only to those who tick the box on a claim form. The settlement site is blunt: “The only way to receive benefits from this Settlement is by submitting a valid and timely Claim Form.” Do nothing and you release your claims and get neither money nor monitoring.

The online claim at JacksDataBreachSettlement.com asks for the Notice ID from the mailing; a paper form can be downloaded or requested by phone and must be postmarked by November 30, 2026, with any supporting documents attached. The administrator is Simpluris — Jack's Family Restaurants, LP Data Incident Settlement, c/o Settlement Administrator, P.O. Box 25226, Santa Ana, CA 92799; (844) 958-3850, 24 hours; info@JacksDataBreachSettlement.com. Payment method — PayPal, Venmo, Zelle or a physical check — is chosen on the form.

To stay out of the settlement and keep the right to sue, a signed request naming the case and containing the words “Request for Exclusion” must be mailed to the same box, marked ATTN: Exclusion Request, by November 13, 2026. You may exclude only yourself. Objections are due the same day and carry a list of requirements that has grown a new item since most notices were drafted: alongside the five-year history of prior objections by you and your lawyer, the agreement requires a statement of “whether the objector and/or his or her counsel used Artificial Intelligence to assist in drafting their objection, and if so, what platform they used.” Class counsel and Jack's may also take discovery from objectors.

The final approval hearing is December 15, 2026 at 9:00 a.m. before Judge Burke in the Northern District of Alabama. The notice and FAQ give the time as Eastern; the court sits in Central Time, so check the settlement site before making any plan around it. Benefits are distributed only after final approval and the resolution of any appeals — which puts the $55 checks and the monitoring codes in 2027.