August 31, 2026 · 5 min read
You read that a company settled, you search its name and the word settlement, and you get a page of results that all look official. They have court-looking headers. They use the case name. Several of them have a form.
Only one of those pages can actually accept your claim. The rest range from harmless to a waste of your afternoon, and the difference is not obvious from the search result. Here is the whole test, which takes about thirty seconds once you know what you are looking at.
| What it is | How to recognise it | What it wants | Can it take your claim? |
|---|---|---|---|
| The administrator | A single-purpose domain named in the court-approved notice, often run by a claims or accounting firm. Plain, ugly, dense with dates and definitions. | Your claim form. | Yes: only here. |
| An aggregator or listing site | Lists many settlements at once. Summarises the notice and links onward. Often carries ads. | Pageviews. | No. It links to the administrator: if the link is current. |
| A lead-generation page | Built around one form. The headline is usually a question about whether you qualify. No named administrator, no case number, no specific deadline. | Your name, email and phone, to sell as a legal lead. | No, and it usually does not claim it can: read the small print. |
| A law firm advertisement | Firm branding. Often about a case that has not settled and is still recruiting plaintiffs. | Clients for a case that may take years. | No. There may be no settlement to claim yet at all. |
The uncomfortable part: the last two are frequently the ones that rank. They are built to rank, because a legal lead is worth real money, while the administrator's site is built to satisfy a court order and nobody optimises it for search.
This is not a general-purpose scam checklist. It is the test we run on every settlement before it is allowed into PayUpBro, written out in the order the checks actually happen.
The check that catches the most pages is the least dramatic one: the deadline.
Listing sites rarely take a settlement down when it closes. The page keeps its rankings and keeps sending people to a claim form that stopped accepting claims months ago. Ranking today is not evidence that a settlement is open today: those are two unrelated facts.
It is the highest-converting sentence in the category, and it is a promise nobody in a position to make it would make. Whether you qualify is decided by the court-appointed administrator, after you file, against a class definition written into the settlement agreement. A page that answers that question with a form is not checking anything: the form is the product.
The honest version of that sentence is longer and worse for conversion: here is who the class covers, here is the deadline, here is the administrator, and you may be eligible.
PayUpBro runs the same five checks before a settlement can appear anywhere in the product. A discovery pass finds candidates; a verification pass locates the court-approved administrator URL and confirms that the page is live and corroborates the claim; aggregator and listing hosts are rejected outright as claim links. Nothing reaches you on the strength of a single search result.
The deadline rule is structural rather than editorial: a settlement whose deadline has passed cannot be marked active in our database, so the failure above, a stale page pointing at a closed form, is one we cannot ship even by accident.
See every settlement currently open in Canada and the US →
Or just the ones filable without a receipt →
No. Filing with the administrator is free, and legal fees are paid from the settlement fund under court approval. A request for payment in order to submit a claim means you are not on the administrator's site.
No. Class counsel already represents the class. After approval, class members file directly.
Generally no. The claim form is a sworn statement about your own purchase, account or loss, so administrators expect you to submit it yourself. That is also why we link you to the form rather than collecting anything. We could not file it for you even if we wanted to.
Then nothing can be filed, and any page still advertising it is out of date. We remove closed settlements rather than leaving them to rank.
PayUpBro is not a law firm and never files a claim for you. This page describes how to read publicly available settlement notices; it is not legal advice. Whether you qualify is decided by the court-appointed settlement administrator, not by us.