Lemonade got hacked. Cybercriminals grabbed driver's license numbers from 190,000 customers. The company settled for $10.5 million. That works out to roughly $55 per victim before the lawyers take their cut.
Your driver's license number. The thing that identifies you to every government database, financial institution, and traffic court in America. Gone. Stolen by someone who probably lives in a country you can't spell and operates from an internet café you'll never visit.
Lemonade sells insurance through an app. They promised to make insurance fast and painless using AI and behavioral economics. Instead they made identity theft fast and painless using inadequate cybersecurity. The invisible hand of the market works in mysterious ways.
The settlement website asks if you qualify. Here's how you know: Did you give Lemonade your driver's license? Did you trust a company named after a beverage to protect your most sensitive personal information? Congratulations. You qualify.
They'll offer you credit monitoring. Free identity protection services for twelve months. As if the criminals set a calendar reminder to start using your stolen data in month thirteen. As if they're waiting politely for your protection to expire before they open seventeen credit cards in your name and finance a jet ski in Tampa.
The lawyers will take forty percent. The victims will get twenty-three dollars and a coupon for more Lemonade insurance. The cybercriminals will use the driver's license numbers until the heat death of the universe.
Someone at Lemonade had one job. Protect the data. They failed. The customers trusted them anyway because the app had a clean interface and a friendly chatbot. Now 190,000 people get to spend the rest of their lives wondering if that fraud alert is real or if someone in Belarus just bought a Camaro with their credit.
When life gives you lemons, apparently you lose a hundred and ninety thousand driver's licenses and pay fifty-five bucks per victim to make it go away.
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