Palm Beach Tan Owes Illinois Customers a Fourth and Final $322.52 Fingerprint Payment, Due Around September 4 — and a Second Settlement Just Opened That Pays Up to $1,500 for Every Text Sent After You Replied STOP. Same Company, Two Cases, One of Them Closing October 4.

Rottner v. Palm Beach Tan, Inc. is a 2015 Illinois case under the Biometric Information Privacy Act. The claim was that the chain's salons identified customers by finger scan without the written consent, disclosures and retention schedule BIPA requires. Palm Beach Tan denied it, removed the scanners from its Illinois salons as of March 24, 2016, and settled: a $10,300,000 fund for everyone who scanned a finger at an Illinois Palm Beach Tan salon between November 13, 2010 and March 24, 2016, with Kroll as administrator.

The unusual part is the payment plan. “In order to allow Palm Beach Tan to pay all the money, the Settlement Fund will be paid in four installments over four years,” the FAQ explains, with claimants receiving “four estimated equal installments of $175 to $350 per year” — and the lawyers taking their fee, up to 35 percent, on the same four-year schedule. The estimate turned out low. The administrator's banner today reads: “THE FIRST PAYMENT OF $322.52 WAS SENT OUT ON AUGUST 18, 2022. THREE SUBSEQUENT PAYMENTS OF AN EQUAL AMOUNT WILL FOLLOW EACH YEAR AND ARE ANTICIPATED ON SEPTEMBER 4.” Counting from 2022, the fourth and last installment is the one due around September 4, 2026, and four equal payments make $1,290.08 per approved claimant.

There is nothing to file now — the claims window closed in 2022 with the May 30, 2022 exclusion deadline and a June 21, 2022 fairness hearing. If you were approved and have moved, the money follows the payment method you chose on the 2022 claim form (Zelle, PayPal, Venmo or check), so a changed address or closed account is the thing to fix with the administrator, not the court.

The second case is federal and young. Alex Hudson of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, sued Palm Beach Tan in 2023 in the Middle District of North Carolina. His first amended complaint, dated September 7, 2023, quotes the marketing texts (“Palm Beach Tan: BOGO Sunbed Tans & Upgrades + Lotion Specials … Reply STOP to opt out”) and then lists the dates on which he did exactly that: “on at least 10 separate occasions” between May 23, 2022 and February 23, 2023, he texted “STOP” or “Stop.” Each time, the complaint says, the system answered “You have opted-out and will receive no further messages from Palm Beach Tan” — and the promotions continued. The complaint alleges the chain “deliberately programmed its telephone dialing systems to ignore such requests and continue sending telemarketing messages to consumers for months after receiving a ‘Stop’ request.”

Palm Beach Tan moved to dismiss; U.S. District Judge William Osteen Jr. denied the motion on September 13, 2024, according to Top Class Actions. The company's Memphis advertising agency, Archer Malmo, was later added as a defendant. Both companies deny wrongdoing and, per the settlement FAQ, “deny that the text messages at issue constitute ‘telemarketing’ or ‘telephone solicitations’ under the TCPA.”

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act is why the per-message number is so large. The statute provides $500 per violating message, up to $1,500 if the violation was willful, which is the figure the settlement adopts as its ceiling.

From the official Verita settlement site, hudsonclass.com, read on September 2, 2026:

The $1,500 is a cap, not a promise. After fees, the incentive award and administration costs come out, roughly $1.6 million is left at most; at the full $1,500 that pays for only about 1,100 messages across the entire class. The site is explicit that payments “will depend on the total number of Valid Claims filed” and are set by dividing what remains by the number of qualifying messages. If 10,000 post-stop messages are claimed, the rate is about $160 each; if 50,000, about $32. Even at the low end that is far more per person than the typical consumer settlement — and it is per message, so someone who kept getting promotions for a year after replying STOP has a materially larger claim than someone who got one.

The messages are counted “as reflected in the text message data,” meaning the defendants' own records, which is why the form asks for the phone number that received the texts. You do not have to prove the texts yourself, but the number has to match theirs. Money left over — or checks never cashed — goes to a charity, not back to the companies.

If you tanned in Illinois between 2010 and 2016 and filed in 2022: watch for the fourth installment around September 4. If it does not arrive within a few weeks, the Rottner administrator is Kroll Settlement Administration via pbtsettlement.com; have the payment method you chose in 2022 ready. Nothing new can be filed in that case.

If you texted STOP to Palm Beach Tan and the texts kept coming: file at hudsonclass.com, or mail the form to Hudson v. Palm Beach Tan, Inc. & Archer Malmo, Inc. Settlement Administrator, P.O. Box 301172, Los Angeles, CA 90030-1172, by October 4, 2026; questions to 1-888-808-5494. Use the number that received the messages. If you would rather sue on your own for the statutory $500–$1,500 per message, the exclusion letter has to be postmarked by the same date — and the FAQ lists exactly what it must contain.

Palm Beach Tan, founded in 1990 and based in Dallas, describes itself as the nation's largest indoor tanning chain; a 2018 Dallas Business Journal report put it at more than 660 locations. That footprint is the reason two very different privacy statutes — Illinois' biometric law and the federal telemarketing law — have each produced a settlement website with the company's name on it.