The Federal Trade Commission is sending Zelle payments to people who were sent an AT&T or Ring refund and never cashed the check. The agency says the money goes straight into the recipient’s bank account, with a note about the settlement. Two separate FTC cases are involved, and each has its own refund administrator and phone number.
Who the Zelle payments are for
The payments depend on a prior payment. The FTC’s wording on both pages limits the Zelle round to people who were already sent a payment and did not take it. A household that was never sent an AT&T or Ring refund does not appear to be covered by these pages. A person who remembers an old refund check from either case and never cashed it is the person the Zelle round is built for.
The question many readers will ask is whether an uncashed check from April 2024 or August 2025 can still be turned into money. According to the FTC pages, it can, if the check came from one of these two programs: the payment goes by Zelle to the bank account, and the administrator’s phone line is the place to ask. The step for anyone in that position is to find out which program the old check belonged to, then call the matching number.
An AT&T or Ring refund check from April 2024 or August 2025 that never got cashed is money the FTC is now paying out by Zelle, and each program has its own phone line. The Settlement & Refund Recovery System explains how to get an expired or uncashed settlement check reissued.
Get the uncashed-check reissue steps in the Settlement & Refund Recovery System →
The AT&T data-throttling refunds
The FTC’s AT&T refund page, dated August 2026, says “The FTC is sending Zelle payments to eligible former AT&T customers who were sent a payment and didn’t cash their check.” The same page covers people who did not accept a PayPal payment. According to the FTC’s lawsuit, the page says, AT&T “unfairly reduced data speeds for customers with unlimited data plans.”
The first round of payments went out in April 2024, and the FTC says it produced more than $5.6 million in refunds. The page does not give a total for the Zelle round, a count of recipients, a per-person amount or a send date. Anyone with questions is told to call the refund administrator at 1-877-654-1982, and the page adds that the FTC never asks anyone to pay money to get a refund.
The Ring refunds
Ring’s case is a different matter with a different administrator. The FTC’s Ring refund page, dated July 2026, describes a lawsuit over failures to protect customer accounts. The settlement required Ring to pay money, delete videos it should not have kept, and set up a privacy and security program. The page does not state the settlement’s dollar amount.
Payments first went out in April 2024. A second round in August 2025 resulted in more than $5.4 million in refunds, the page says. It now reads: “the FTC is sending Zelle payments to people who didn’t cash their check or accept their PayPal payment.” Questions go to the refund administrator at 1-833-637-4884. As on the AT&T page, no deadline appears, and the FTC repeats that it never asks anyone to pay to get a refund. The $5.6 million belongs to the AT&T program and the $5.4 million to the Ring program. They are separate figures for separate rounds, not a combined total.
How other FTC refunds handle checks and deadlines
The FTC does not run every refund the same way. Its Avast refund page describes a second round of 91,093 payments totaling more than $1.5 million, open only to people who accepted the first payment, in a program that paid by check, PayPal or Zelle. That page tells recipients to cash a check within 90 days. Payments under the agency’s Amazon refund program expire 60 days after the issue date, and the page says automatic refunds there continue through April 2027.
The contrast matters for anyone holding an old check. The AT&T and Ring pages state no cashing window for the Zelle round, while the Avast and Amazon pages do. A check from a different FTC case could be subject to a window of its own, and the right way to find out is the page for that case.
Getting an old AT&T or Ring check reissued
The place to start is the FTC page for the case behind the check: the AT&T page for the former customer, and the Ring page for the camera and doorbell owner. Each lists its own refund administrator’s phone line, 1-877-654-1982 for AT&T and 1-833-637-4884 for Ring, and neither charges anything to get a refund.
Before calling, it helps to find the old check or any letter that came with it, since the FTC says Zelle payments go to people who were sent a payment. Note the name and address the original payment went to, the month it arrived, and the bank account where a Zelle deposit can land. The deposit will come with a note about the settlement, so a deposit with that note is the one to expect.
The dollar figures in these cases come from two FTC pages: more than $5.6 million in AT&T refunds in the first round, and more than $5.4 million in Ring refunds in the second.
An uncashed AT&T or Ring check from 2024
A refund check that sat in a drawer since April 2024 can still turn into a Zelle payment, but only through the right program and the right phone line. The Settlement & Refund Recovery System covers how to get an expired or uncashed settlement check reissued, and its claim log and payment tracker keep each program’s call and deposit in one place.
Reissue that old settlement check with the Refund Recovery System →
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
