If you took jobs on the Handy platform, now called Angi Services, watch your mailbox. The Federal Trade Commission is mailing $2.7 million in refund checks to 62,893 people who worked on the platform. It’s the payout from a settlement over what workers were told they could earn and what actually landed in their pockets.
You have 90 days from the date on the check to cash it. After that, the money is gone.
The FTC and New York Attorney General Letitia James took action against Handy in January 2025. According to the settlement, Handy advertised earnings “as high as $45 an hour,” and only about 10% of workers ever actually made that. On top of the gap, Handy charged workers a fee to get paid on the day they finished a job, rather than waiting about a week, and hit them with fines when customers didn’t show up or wouldn’t let them in. The fines came through a multi-step process workers had to follow to avoid. Miss a step and it came out of your pay.
Handy paid $2.95 million to settle. The FTC is now redistributing $2.7 million of that back to the 62,893 workers who had checks coming. The average check works out to about $43 per worker. That is not the paycheck the ads promised. It is real money and worth walking to the mailbox for.
Here’s the catch. Refund scams follow every FTC payout like a shadow. The FTC never charges a fee to release a refund. It never asks for your bank account number to send you money. If you get an email, text, or phone call claiming to be from the FTC or from the refund administrator asking for either, delete it. The real administrator is Simpluris Inc., reachable at 833-647-9063.
If you think you should have a check coming and one hasn’t turned up in the next few weeks, call Simpluris directly and confirm your mailing address is current. If you moved after leaving the Handy platform, that call is the difference.
If your check arrives, cash it inside 90 days from the date printed on the front. Not from the date you receive it. The date printed on the check.
If you are still picking up work on Angi Services, or on any gig platform, do this today. Open the app. Find the earnings page. Read what the platform claims the top workers make. Then find the fee schedule and read every fine, every payment-timing fee, and every rating penalty. The advertised number is a marketing number. The fees are the actual math. Both come out before you leave the driveway.
The Handy settlement doesn’t close the earnings-gap game across gig work. It closes one hole at one company. What made Handy pay was hiding the fees and fines. Every other platform can still advertise the top of the distribution, as long as they disclose the cuts. That is on you to check.
If you got a check, it’s yours. Cash it.
How Candid Yak makes money. Some of the products we write about pay us if you apply or sign up through our links. That never changes our verdict, our rankings, or the numbers in this article. We call a bad deal a bad deal whether it pays us or not. Some brands shown in our comparison tools are placeholder examples while we finalize partner agreements, and we label them as such.