If you delivered for Grubhub, or you ever got locked out of a Grubhub account with money sitting in it, check your mail and your PayPal notifications this week. There’s a payment coming and it has an expiration date.
The FTC started sending more than $23.8 million on August 12, split across 640,038 people. Most get a paper check. Some get PayPal. The check says on it that you have 90 days to cash it. The PayPal payments have to be redeemed within 30 days.
Nobody is going to call and remind you.
The money traces back to a case the FTC and the Illinois Attorney General brought in December 2024. The agencies said Grubhub deceived drivers about how much they’d make delivering food, blocked diners out of their own accounts and the funds in them, and listed restaurants on the platform without asking the restaurants first.
The middle allegation is the one to sit with. Regulators said Grubhub locked people out of their own balances, which is a long way from slow service and a junk fee.
The settlement made Grubhub advertise driver pay honestly, give users a way to dispute a blocked account, and list restaurants only with their consent. Those are fixes going forward. This payment is the part that reaches backward, to the people who were already out the money.
A 30-day window on a PayPal payment is short, and that’s the part worth being annoyed about. If you signed up for gig work in 2022, used a burner email, and haven’t opened that inbox since, the notification lands somewhere you don’t look and the money quietly goes back. The FTC isn’t hiding it. It’s just that unclaimed is the default outcome when the clock is that tight and the notice arrives cold.
So do this now. Open PayPal and look at your activity, including any old email address you used for delivery work. Watch your mail for an envelope you’d normally assume is junk, because a legitimate government redress check looks like exactly the thing you throw away. If a check shows up, cash it that week rather than putting it on the counter.
If you think you should have gotten something and nothing arrived, call the refund administrator, Analytics Consulting LLC, at 1-888-446-4992.
Now the part that matters most. The FTC says flatly that it never requires people to pay money or provide account information to get a payment. Any text, call, or email asking for a fee, a gift card, your bank login, or a “verification” payment to release your Grubhub refund is a scammer working from the same news you just read. Refund announcements are public, which makes them a gift to fraudsters. Hang up.
For scale, the FTC says its actions returned more than $435 million to people in 2025, and it lists every active refund program at ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds. Worth a look once a year to see whether a company that took your money is on it. Money you get back is money you don’t have to earn twice, which is the whole point of our budgeting guides.
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