 Hey everybody, welcome back today to Retro Tech. I've got some brand new information for you on the litigation that we've discussed in the past. I'll link to a couple of videos in the description here if you want to get caught up. But basically, there's a large antitrust lawsuit that's pretty much been rounded up almost. And there's nearly half a billion, that's right, half a billion dollars that are on the line here. And that's the judgment amount. The reason I'm bringing this back up is I did find an interesting article, which I've got in the background and I will link to that. But before I jump into this article talking about specifically the state of Washington, I wanted to show you a letter that came to me from a viewer. Now, since the last video, I did have someone reach out to me and say, hey Steve, I'm actually a member of one of these groups and I've had this, I've been in this class action lawsuit personally and I'm starting to get some letters back saying I might actually eventually be getting some payout on it. So let's see this letter that he specifically got recently from the law firm that's on the plaintiff for this case. And this is dated from 612, 2020. So he did block his name out to be protected and that's fine and he should have. So he said I could go through this, kind of show you what I thought about it. So dear Brandon, thank you for submitting proof of your claim and the above reference number. After review your proof of claim form and the documentation you provided in support of your claim, the settlement administrator has made a determination in consultation with counsel regarding the eligibility of your claim amounts. Your claim has been approved at the below purchase amounts. So here's the purchase amounts, important money amount. First off, television purchases approved amount of $2,000. That means that he submitted proof that he purchased televisions that were CRTs and the amount of $2,000 during the timeframe where the antitrust lawsuit had occurred and the antitrust activities occurred. And so that was the $2,000 and then a monitor purchase of $150 and then CRT purchases, which would have been other type of CRT devices. It kind of glows down here. And if you wanna just pause this video and check out some more on this document, you can, I'll scroll up some and see if there's anything else really important. But to determine your eligibility, it talks about how what was calculated full value, 100%, CRTs are valued at 50%. So he might have submitted $4,000 in approval and they only give him a value of 50%, which would have been worked out between attorneys on this whole settlement. So the CRT computer monitors at 75%, so that's three quarters of what he paid for it, most likely. And he was asking, is this the amount I will get for the CRT purchase value is 1,100, 1,250? That is not, see, if you look down here under this underlined letter or sentence here, it says the eligible claim amounts are not the actual dollar figure of wards amount you will receive. So what it's saying here is that's the actual amount of money that he probably paid, purchase retail value for these CRTs and then they give you half the value so you spend 4,000 on CRTs during that period and they were bought from the companies that were involved in this so that you take that and you give them half the value for that and then that is giving you a purchase value. So see, well actually I'm sorry, so see that's where this all comes from, excuse me, I should probably go back a little bit but let's just continue on. What I mean by that is this was the amount he submitted 2,000 for the purchased amount and then 150 for a monitor and they gave him 75% value on the monitor which was the 112.50 and then 50% on his CRT purchases so that's 1112.50, so that's the amount of questionable funds that were submitted towards this illegal activity, that's a better way to put it. And then so what needs to happen is he's gonna get a portion of the payout that will be determined but if we wanna go in here this is all gonna be split up, this is not what it says on here, this is not how much you will receive, you're gonna receive a much lower amount than that. It's a little bit cleared up more here. It's hard to determine what the exact amount is but I mean it's gonna be closer to pennies on the dollar because at the end of the day the attorneys are gonna collect most likely about 300 million out of the 500 and like 50 million dollars that are at stake total in the class section lawsuit and conspiracy and everything else so just wanted to give you a quick update, this is an article from March of this year and it is from Directly in Washington. Let me see if I can scale it down a little bit so I can get the whole thing in the screen but again March 13th, Olympia Washington, the attorney general announces there's a nearly 20 million dollars in checks. It'll be going out today to nearly 8,400 Washington consumers as a result of the price fixing lawsuit against manufacturers of CRTs. The minimum check to a consumer will be 25 dollars. So a lot of people that filed would get a minimum payment of 25 dollars. The median check will be 52 dollars. So my estimation for Brandon here is that he's gonna get above probably the median. I would imagine he might get double the median but I'd really be interested in seeing how long it takes for him to actually get a check and what the actual end of the day amount is he gets for being part of the lawsuit. If I had to give a guess based on what these residents are getting in the state of Washington I would just guess that there's probably gonna be 52 you know maybe he's gonna get a little bit over $100. Let's just give him a hundred dollar guess and see how it comes out. I'm sure he'll update us. So again it tells you a little bit more in this article and you can go down there and read it but I really wanted to show you how it says Ferguson's lawsuit asserted, which I love reading this part of it, that CRT manufacturers including Samsung, LG, Panasonic, Hitachi, Chung-Hui, Toshiba, Phillips, engaged in price fixing, price fixing scheme to drive up the cost of the CRTs from 1995 to 2007. During those 12 years, the alleged price fixing conspiracy caused Washington consumers to be overcharged for their CRT televisions and computer monitors. Ferguson's lawsuit asserted the company's held secret meetings known internally as the glass meetings in which they agreed to fix prices of CRTs. For example, the lawsuit alleged the company's agreed to artificially restrict supply to keep prices high and share information with companies regarding capacity, production prices and consumer demands for CRTs. According to the lawsuit, conspirators split the glass meetings into three tiers, top tiers for the highest level executives, management meetings for mid-level management and working-level meetings for lower-level sales and marketing employees. So this was all the way from the top down. It was a company-wide thing to just be able to try to compete with Sony until the late 2000s where CRTs eventually were phased out of the market. So, see, this stuff is just crazy, man, that there's even this crooked element to all of this. But I guess, I don't know, we'll probably follow up on this again just because there's an opportunity to learn more if I can get more information on exactly how much people are actually gonna get back as payments for what looks like. At the end of the day, it's just gonna get these attorneys really, really rich. And a lot of everyday Joe-Americans aren't gonna get, who were actually screwed on this, aren't gonna get a payout from it. And, or if they do, it's only gonna be $100 and it's just a whole big thing so that a couple attorneys can charge millions of dollars. And eventually, it did take them 15 to 20 years probably of work when it's all said and done, but they're gonna get $300 million back. So, I know that people may, well, Steve, what's your expertise on this? So just to give you a little bit of background, if you still wanna stick around, you can listen to that. Otherwise, thanks for watching the video and listening to the information, look for more to come. And if you wanna see anything, they will be linked in the description. But personally, I have been involved in litigation outside of RetroTech. I have been in the insurance and insurance services and I'm a licensed agent for property and casualty and health and life insurance in my state of Tennessee. And over that decade, I've been involved in many real-life litigations and lawsuits involving all kinds of things that involve businesses from day to day as well as courtroom settings and especially arbitration and other kind of things like that. So I do have a lot of experience in that but besides that, my job outside of this daily does involve me reading lots and lots of legal documents and I've often meet with attorneys to discuss how clients' outcomes of cases may turn out. And the thing you need to realize too is with litigation, it's obvious here that nothing's gonna move swiftly. And I think that maybe this is something that should be addressed with our system as it is because at the end of the day, again, we're seeing the people at the very top of this are gonna get a large amount of money and that's just the attorneys who worked on the case and then the people who were really affected by these price gouging things. You could tell when a conspiracy like that goes on, it affects more than just the price of an item. It's gonna affect the workforce if they're holding back and not competing with each other and then they're also gonna make it more difficult for newer technologies to break through which it's kind of what took them down ultimately. It was not the fact that they were busted for price fixing. It was the fact that they had to switch over from the CRT altogether and just give up on the format or I'm sure they would have continued on the practice and it may, you know, it could have been going on for much longer, but that's all just hearsay and just my personal feelings on it. Remember, this is all just how I feel about it and my personal viewpoint on it and just a little bit of information on the inside from what I feel and what I see. So thanks again for watching today. I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content.