"A large number of claims for cash instead of credit monitoring means only one thing: each person who takes the money option will wind up only getting a small amount of money, he said. "Nowhere near the $125 they could have gotten if there hadn’t been such an enormous number of claims filed." 

He encouraged people to take the free credit monitoring instead, which he said was more valuable anyway, though he noted that if people paid out-of-pocket expenses to recover from the breach, they can still be compensated. 

The money is one small part of the up to $700 million that the firm has been forced to pay out in fines and penalties to various government agencies. FastCompany noted that, given the total number of people affected by the hack, this amounts to approximately $4 per person. However, since only $31 million of the total amount has been set aside for individual compensation, if all 147 million of those affected opted for cash, each claimant would receive only 21 cents.