Drewe Raimi was lying in bed scrolling TikTok when she got the notification: Venmo’s cash register cha-ching, telling her $3,456.44 had just hit her account. She assumed it was spam, or a friend playing a prank. But the cash out came from Juul Labs Inc, the e-cigarette company that turned vapes into cool kid accessories and revived nicotine for millennials and gen Z youth.
Raimi had filled out a class-action claim with friends during her senior year of college in 2021, joining a lawsuit against Juul and Altria, one of the world’s largest tobacco producers, which owned stake in Juul until 2023.
“I thought maybe I’d get $5, and honestly, I forgot about it completely,” said Raimi, who is now 23 and lives in New York. “My college group chat sent around the lawsuit as a joke, to see what happened.”
The lawsuit alleged that Juul products such as vapes and flavored nicotine pods were unlawfully marketed to minors, and the public was misled about their addictive properties. Juul and the tobacco company Altria agreed to settlements totaling over $300m, and more than 14m claims were filed by Juul customers before the window for filing closed in February. Payments to 842,000 eligible customers, ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars, began hitting bank accounts this month, according to NBC News.
On TikTok, users shared videos of their surprise payday. “Whoever told me to sign up for the Juul class action, I love you so much,” one woman wrote in the caption of a video viewed over 45,000 times; her payout topped $7,000. “When you forgot you signed up for the Juul Lawsuit 2 years ago and woke up to the bag in your Venmo this morning,” another woman posted.
Some questioned if the payouts were worth years of nicotine consumption. In one TikTok, a woman shared her payout – a modest $288.03 – with the caption: “When you wake up to the best present but you had to deal with a crippling nicotine addiction for years to get it.” Raimi said she’d used Juul casually in college but does not consider herself addicted to nicotine.
Others described large payouts years after making “joke” claims as students. It’s unclear what the “joke” is – that applicants never used Juul products, did not consider themselves addicted, or did not believe they’d receive thousand-dollar payouts.
Unsurprisingly, Christine P Bartholomew, a professor of law at the University at Buffalo School of Law, does not think people should brag online about lying in a class action claim. “That can be fraud on the court, because they’re attesting to the accuracy of the information they exhibited in a claim,” she said. “They could face criminal charges.”
Class action lawsuits filed against corporations can seem flippant, with plaintiffs often only earning a few dollars. Earlier this year, Caribbean Cruises reportedly sent some customers $10 after overzealous robocalling, and Right Guard provided some people about $3 to resolve claims that its spray deodorant contained the known carcinogen benzene.
But Bartholomew says payouts like Juul’s still benefit the public. “Class actions sometimes get a bad rep, with people saying, gosh, the stamp I used to send in the settlement is probably worth more than the amount I’ll get,” she said. “[The Juul suit] reminds us that the narrative doesn’t always fit.”
In 1998, the US’s four largest tobacco companies reached a legal settlement with the attorneys general of 46 states. But the $206bn over 25 years that the companies agreed to pay as compensation for medical costs for smoking-related illnesses went directly to states, not individual smokers.
The vaping settlement holds Juul accountable for how it promoted products to underage customers, says Dr Robert K Jackler, a professor at Stanford Medicine and principle investigator at Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising. “This was a carefully crafted, targeted campaign to recruit young people to recommend Juul to their compatriots, and it was remarkably successful,” he said. “Juul essentially recruited American teenagers to become enthusiastic evangelists for the brand.”
(Altria denied the allegations made in the lawsuit, while Juul did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement.)
Juul, a startup founded in 2005 by two Stanford graduate students and former smokers, promised to help adults who smoked cigarettes kick the habit. Originally marketed as a healthier way to consume nicotine, as a vapor, the brand’s sleek design and flavored pods ultimately appealed to children, thanks in no small part to the influencers tapped to market Juul.
By 2018, a coalition of senators including Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren wrote an open letter to Juul accusing the brand of “putting an entire new generation of children at risk of nicotine addiction and other health consequences”.
The last few years, according to Jackler, have seen “a flood of thousands of lawsuits” against the company led by states and individual plaintiffs, most of them now settled. The class action suit “sends a clear message to the company that it can’t reap profits from its misdeeds without consequences”, says Jackler.
Will a surprise Juul payout change young people’s opinions toward nicotine use? “I tried vaping and I didn’t love it,” Raimi said. “I’ve never smoked a cigarette.”
Still, Raimi believes that minors who developed nicotine addictions from Juuling deserve “some sort of compensation”.
“If you’re a minor and you have no idea what the thing that’s being sold to you really does, it’s hard to make a long-term decision that could affect your future,” she said.
For now, Raimi’s not sure what to do with her random payday. Her parents have told her to invest the money. Friends have told her to buy something nice and frivolous. Random people on TikTok told her to run them some cash. “It’s free money,” Raimi said. “I’ll probably end up spending it on rent.”