You may recall the announcement of a settlement in the De Beers diamond lawsuit class action that could put money back in your pocket for your recent diamond jewelry purchases. And even more recently in the news is word that those popular Airborne anti-sickness supplements probably don’t work, and a class action lawsuit against Airborne’s makers could give you a decent-sized refund.

At this point you may be sitting there thinking, “Hmm, maybe I could make a living buying all sorts of garbage and waiting for the manufacturer to get sued so I can cash in on the settlement.” But before you quit your job and set up a tent in the back of your local courthouse, keep in mind that relying on class action lawsuits for a steady income is, to put it gently, super-duper retarded.

That said, there are still some class actions on the horizon (either just being filed, in the process of being considered in court, or going to settlement) that could net you a few bucks based on your past purchases or actions. Below you’ll find a list of some of the more interesting lawsuits making headlines that might include you in their affected classes.

It’s Not So Comcastic After All!

Who’s Getting Sued: Comcast, everyone’s favorite cable and internet services provider.
What’s It About? Comcast is being sued in California and Washington D.C. for interfering with popular peer-to-peer downloads, allegedly slowing their speeds or sometimes preventing them altogether. Comcast may argue that it can do whatever the hell it wants with its internet tubes, while the consumers bringing the suits will probably throw Comcast’s claims of unfettered internet access back in its face.
How Much Money Could I Expect? Don’t worry too much if you’re a Comcast user but you don’t live in California or D.C. It’s only a matter of time before one of these lawsuits transforms into a nationwide action or a separate one pops up in your neighborhood. If Comcast loses or agrees to settle, you may be able to get a partial or full refund for your internet access fees over a certain time period—anywhere from a few months to a few years.
How Do I Track This Case? Subscribe to Google News updates on “comcast class action” in your RSS reader.

Never Get Between a Gamer and His Fun

Who’s Getting Sued: Microsoft, maker of the Xbox, Xbox 360, Windows, and other things that tend to break a lot.
What’s It About? Millions of gamers seeking to unwind over the December 2007 holiday break instead ended up breaking Microsoft’s Xbox Live online videogame service which couldn’t handle the extreme load on its servers, resulting in an outage of the service that lasted for days. A handful of enraged gamers in Texas, not satisfied with Microsoft’s apology which came with a free arcade game dowload, filed a class action suit in January seeking $5 million in damages.
How Much Money Could I Expect? If you’re lucky, you might get a free month of Xbox Live service or a refund for the alleged outage period. One month of Xbox Live service runs for about $8.
How Do I Track This Case? Subscribe to Google News updates on “xbox live class action” in your RSS reader.

Two Cases Sprint-ing to the Courthouse

Who’s Getting Sued: Sprint Nextel Corp., provider of cellular phone services and constant buyer’s remorse.
What’s It About? Sprint Nextel saw itself hit with two class action lawsuits in February 2008—one alleging it illegally extended cell phone contracts for pretty much any reason (You like the color blue? That’s a two-year contract extension.), and another claiming it improperly charged roaming fees.
How Much Money Could I Expect? Your guess is as good as mine. Depending on how the proceeds of any settlement or award are split, you might see anywhere from a few bucks to a bucket of cash if you were hit with unfair roaming fees or contract extensions. Just the contract extension suit by itself could bring in hundreds of dollars of monthly fee refunds for consumers who were wrongly locked into longer contracts.
How Do I Track This Case? Subscribe to Google News updates on “sprint nextel class action” in your RSS reader.

Your Blu-ray Player Doesn’t Work? Uh, It’s Supposed to Do That

Who’s Getting Sued: Samsung, manufacturer of electronic toys for girls and boys.
What’s It About? This one’s pretty straightforward: buyers of Samsung’s early generation of Blu-ray players insist they (the players) are pieces of junk that won’t play the latest awesome Blu-ray movies like Fantastic 4 and The Land Before Time 47: Hi-Def Dinos. Samsung responded to the lawsuit saying, “Oh crap, we were hoping nobody would notice that.”
How Much Money Could I Expect? Samsung should settle this one pretty quickly since it’s so obvious they’re in the wrong. Expect a lame settlement though—something like discount vouchers for another piece of crap Samsung Blu-ray player.
How Do I Track This Case? Subscribe to Google News updates on “samsung blu-ray class action” in your RSS reader.

Yeah, This PC’s About As Vista Capable As My Game Boy

Who’s Getting Sued: Microsoft, software giant that gets sued for every product it ever makes.
What’s It About? Consumers allege that Microsoft, in order to keep PC sales going during the multi-year delays of its new Vista operating system, slapped “Vista Capable” stickers on PCs and laptops originally equipped with Windows XP that can now barely run the most basic version of Vista. PC buyers are mad that they spent money on machines that are already out-of-date.
How Much Money Could I Expect? I think Microsoft knows it screwed up badly on this one, so expect a speedy settlement. Depending on how stupid the plantiff’s attorneys are, you could personally see anything from a free copy of “Vista Basic, Lawsuit Edition” for your woefully inadequate PC to a partial or full refund of your machine’s purchase price.
How Do I Track This Case? Subscribe to Google News updates on “vista capable class action” in your RSS reader.

Buy This .com Domain Today For Just $5. No, $10. Now It’s $30. No Wait…

Who’s Getting Sued: Network Solutions, overpriced domain name registrar.
What’s It About? Domain name hunters claim that popular but pricey registrar Network Solutions would put a hold on domain names when users searched for them on its website, preventing the searcher from buying it on a competing registrar’s website at a much lower price. Network Solutions charges roughly $35 a year for domain name registrations; for comparison, I paid GoDaddy.com about $7 to renew punny.org this year.
How Much Money Could I Expect? The typical personal payout for this lawsuit could be some fraction of that $35 a year fee if you found yourself forced to buy a domain from Network Solutions due to their automatic holds. But if you decided not to give in to NetSol’s extortion, you may be better off filing your own suit against them (and excluding yourself from this class during the award distribution phase) to recover whatever actual damages you experienced not being able to get your desired domain name.
How Do I Track This Case? Subscribe to Google News updates on “network solutions class action” in your RSS reader.

90% Efficient… About 50% of the Time

Who’s Getting Sued: Furnace manufacturers Carrier, Bryant, Payne, and Day & Night.
What’s It About? This lawsuit is already in the settlement phase, but it slipped under a lot of people’s radars due to lack of mainstream media coverage. In short, those 90% efficiency furnaces that are supposed to save you money on your heating bills will end up costing you more in the long run because they break down far more often than their 80% efficient counterparts.
How Much Money Could I Expect? Current or previous owners of certain furnace models will get $270 and an enhanced warranty. You have until August 1, 2008 to submit your claim form at www.furnaceclaims.com.
How Do I Track This Case? Subscribe to Google News updates on “carrier bryant class action” in your RSS reader.

Now before you start planning a trip to Jamaica using your chunk of the awards from these lawsuits, remember that there are a few things standing in your way of cashing those settlement checks:

• They have to, like, win the case first. Or at least push the defendants into a settlement.
• Lawyers get their huge cut of the money first.
• Big business lawsuits can drag on for years.
• You’ll probably need receipts for your affected purchases. If you didn’t keep them, your benefits may be reduced or eliminated altogether.
• Anyone named Nick gets his check first. It’s the law. Look it up in this law book of mine that I wrote just now.

Your best bet for keeping up with these class action suits so you don’t miss out on your piece of the settlement pies is by subscribing to the RSS feeds posted with each story above. Each one should monitor Google’s news service for updates to each case and notify you in your feed reader if the suits are settled, won, lost or dismissed.

Universal Law of Finance #37: Any company that makes a ton of money will eventually have to give some of that money back in a class action lawsuit settlement, usually because it did something painfully illegal.

Normally I don’t get too hyped up over class action settlements because an individual included in the settlement class typically only receives a few bucks or a worthless gesture of apology. This one is different. De Beers, the company which essentially has a monopoly on the world’s supply of diamonds, is settling a massive lawsuit brought against it under allegations of monumental price fixing. Whether De Beers is guilty or not will never be decided in court because it’s taking the usual big business way out of gigantic class action lawsuits and throwing out a small morsel of the $6 billion it brings in each year in order to make the whole thing go away. Fortunately, what may be a pittance to De Beers could translate into a sizable sum for you and me.

Under the terms of the settlement, consumers who have purchased a diamond in any form (engagement rings, other jewelry, or even mixed with other gemstones) between January 1994 and March 2006 could be eligible for a tidy refund—anywhere from six to 60% of the original purchase price. Depending on how much you spent on diamonds during the period in question, you’ll be eligible for a refund that you can estimate from the following table.

A lot of people married in the last decade could cash in nicely on their engagement ring purchases. For example, an engagement ring that set you back $5,000 would mean you’d be entitled to a settlement of about $1,600. Those shelling out twice that or more—$10,000 and up—will find themselves in a higher percentage bracket and entitled to $4,500 for every $10,000 they spend on their rings. Other types of diamond jewelry are also available, so good luck trying to remember all of the diamond jewelry you’ve bought since 1994.

Consumers have a few things going against them in this settlement:

1. Lots of people could mean less money for you. The total amount De Beers will pay is capped at some obscene but finite nine-digit figure, so if enough claims are made, you might get less than that percentage listed in the table above. Hmm, maybe I should keep this to myself…
2. You need receipts. While you probably won’t be asked to produce them, the settlement administrators reserve the right to request that you provide receipts for your diamond purchases, and certain large purchases will require a receipt before you get your settlement. Credit card statements should work too, so start digging for your documents before you file a claim. Don’t be an idiot and add an extra zero to your diamond purchases because you could find yourself getting nothing later.
3. Don’t bother if you spent only a bit. If your total diamond purchases during that period were under $165 for mixed-gem jewelry or $95 for diamond-only jewelry, you can stop right now because your settlement chunk would be $10 or less. Such small settlement claims will not be paid due to “administrative costs.”
4. Anything could happen between now and later. It’s likely that the settlement will go through as it’s currently written, but there’s always the chance that something could happen—anything from minor rewrites of clauses to total scrapping of the settlement due to objections or other legal maneuvers.

If you have your receipts and are ready to file a settlement, you can do it online in just five minutes right here:

https://diamondsclassaction.com/secure/Instructions.aspx?AC=yes

I filed mine today for two pieces of diamond jewelry: my wife’s engagement ring (bought in 2004) and a diamond pendant (Christmas 2006). When I told her about it, her reaction was priceless: “That’s a diamond in that pendant?” (I wish I were making that up, but I’m not.) Yeah, she’s getting toy jewelry from those 25-cent dispensers in the supermarket from now on.

We’ve all thought about it at one time or another—breaking the law for money, risking our freedom and our lives for the lavish rewards that can come with being a successful career criminal. I mean, you’re a pretty hot person, so I know you’ve considered once or twice just how much your body could fetch in one night on the big city streets.

In case you’re wondering what you’re missing being a goodie two-shoes, here’s a look at some of the most popular occupational choices of those who dare to flirt with the wrong side of the law.

Hitman / Assassin

Job description: Have gun (or machete, or poison, or samurai sword), will travel. Someone pays you to kill someone, and you go do it. Bonus points for creativity and being able to make it look like an accident.

Benefits and salary: Plenty of opportunities for travel. Skilled hitmen can make tens of thousands of dollars on a single job (maybe even a million bucks if you’re really good).

Drawbacks: Not a whole lot of social interaction (unless you get caught). Getting nabbed can mean a trip to the lethal injection booth.

How to get started: Build a portfolio by killing a few people nobody likes, and put out the word to your underground cronies that you’re looking for work. Print some business cards with a snappy slogan like “Definitely Not An Assassin for Hire” and give them to your friends. The police will never suspect a thing.

Professional Embezzler

Job description: Help alleviate overtaxed businesses of their excess profits. Light creative bookkeeping required.

Benefits and salary: You get the look and feel of a regular, everyday employee but with a significant pay increase.

Drawbacks: Embezzlement is becoming increasingly difficult to pull off given the detail of corporate audits these days. Getting caught means spending some number of years in prisons with people guilty of crimes like skull-crushing and testicle-popping.

How to get started: You may already be in the ideal job for embezzlement, especially if you’re allowed to play with your employer’s checkbook. Simply imagine up a few extra employees and add them to the payroll system. Or get your IT friends to help you skim a few micro-cents from the company accounts.

Narcotics Dealer

Job description: Kind of like a pharmacist, except instead of dispensing antibiotics, you’re distributing products made by less reputable, more Colombian manufacturers.

Benefits and salary: If you can corner the market in a neighborhood with a heavy user base, you’re looking at scoring a hefty profit. Lots of interaction and networking opportunities with people.

Drawbacks: Fierce competition can kill your business… and you. Unfortunately you’ll often be catering to lower-class clientele whose funding may not be all that regular.

How to get started: Pick up a copy of Drug Dealing for Dummies, available in any fine Mexican bookstore. It comes with a free kilo to get you started on your way to running a successful cartel.

Brothel Operator

Job description: Earns lots of entrepreneurial experience managing a quaint house of ill repute. Ideal for workers seeking opportunities in human resources, finance, entertainment, procurement, real estate, and whoring it up.

Benefits and salary: Legal in parts of two states with an ever-growing pool of customers! Earn even more by setting up shop in one of the other 48 states. Meet local politicians, judges, celebrities, and your friends’ husbands.

Drawbacks: Everyone around you has six STDs at any given time. Also, watch out for Robert De Niro.

How to get started: For a quick startup without the legal risks, simply move to Nevada or Rhode Island, rent yourself a piece of real estate in a desirable area, pick up a few employees from nearby bars and college campuses, hang up a couple of neon signs, and watch the dough roll in.

Corrupt Law Enforcement Official

Job description: Shoot bad guys by day, wine and dine with them by night. The perfect supplementary salary plan for the underpaid cop.

Benefits and salary: Work with a great group of folks. Little or no extra work required beyond your normal police duties. In fact, sometimes you’ll get paid to do less work than you normally do. It’s hard to get caught because the only people who really know what you’re doing are criminals too. And if you do get caught, you have your years of flawless police record to help ensure your career has a cushy, jail-free conclusion.

Drawbacks: Well, there’s the whole “you’re a cop, bad guys shoot at you sometimes” thing. But if you’re friends with all of them, they tend to shoot you a whole lot less.

How to get started: 1. Become a cop or other law enforcement official. 2. Bust a lot of perps. Frame them if you have to. 3. Trade their freedom for money. 4. Retire to the private island of your choice.

There’s a fascinating yet frightening discussion over at the FatWallet Finance Forums about restaurant servers stealing their way to higher tips on credit card receipts. Servers upset by low tips that they probably deserved have been known to edit the tip line of credit card receipts to bump up their tip. For example:

See how easily a measly tip is changed to a generous one by a disgruntled server or bartender?

The easiest way to combat this illegal and downright nasty behavior is to reconcile your receipts against your credit card statements each and every month. You’ll spot restaurant wrongdoing and be able to phone it in to your credit card issuer faster than you can say “there’s a fly in my soup.”

But for the trillions of people who don’t want to go through the trouble of reconciling their receipts each month, there’s an easier way to stop tip alterations just by glancing over your credit card statement each month. It involves using checksums to add a layer of security to your tip amount. The term “checksum” normally refers to a technique used by computer systems to ensure file integrity. Here, we’ll be using checksums to ensure human integrity.

There are many checksum systems you can use when tipping, but here’s a great example that’s easy to learn and can be performed without the aid of a calculator unless you suck at math really badly.

Step 1: Look over your receipt

You’ll get ripped off far more often for food and drink overcharges than you will by spiteful servers. Check each billed item and compare it to the menu price.

Step 2: Calculate the appropriate tip

Tip as you normally do without worrying about checksums for now. For our example, let’s say you had the following bill but service was slow, so you’d like to tip about 10%.

Step 3: Apply a checksum

That $4.71 is just begging to have ten dollars added to it, and $51.87 becomes $61.87 so easily. Foil these alteration efforts with this simple checksum method.

Adjust the amount of the tip so that the numbers in the final total to the left of the decimal point add up to the right-most digit. In this case, the total has a “51″ to the left of the decimal point (A). 5 + 1 = 6, so the final digit should be six. Adjust the total to $51.86 or $51.96 (B) by adding nine or subtracting one from the tip (C).

Step 4: Check your credit card statements each month

While the receipt will help you ensure no fraud was enacted upon your dining bill, you only need the statement to verify the checksum. For this example, simply locate the dining transaction, add the numbers to the left of the decimal point, and confirm that they add up to the right-most digit. If they don’t, you’ve been scammed.

This technique is not foolproof. If the scammy server had added nine dollars to the total—making it $60.86—the checksum calculation would still come back okay. But because it’s harder to turn a “51″ into a “60″ than a “61,” it’s unlikely your server will do this unless they’re wise to this particular checksum technique.

Step 5: Deal with the theft

If you hit a checksum that fails, dig out your copy of the receipt to confirm it doesn’t match the total on your statement. Next, do three things:

1. Call your credit card issuer. It should be fairly simple to get a credit for the difference between your actual bill and what you were forced to pay due to this fraud.
2. Call the police. You were the victim of a crime, so you should report it, even if it’s just a few dollars. If the stealing server has multiple victims who report his or her behavior, the police will likely take action against the server and/or the restaurant. Hopefully a few thieving restaurant workers behind bars will set enough of an example to discourage similar actions in others.
3. Call the restaurant (optional). At this point, you’ve likely got your money back and given all the information you can to law enforcement. You can try calling the restaurant to report the theft, but it might not do much. In the best case, the manager will recognize the server’s name on your receipt and confirm he or she has been suspected of wrongdoing. Maybe you’ll even get a free meal out of it for your trouble. Worst case, the restaurant does nothing.

The original poster in the FatWallet Finance Forum topic may be onto something when he or she says that this is probably one of the most widespread types of theft that goes unpunished. Now you have the tools to fight it. The next time you’re at a restaurant, eat, drink, be merry, and do a little extra math come tip time to help combat this rapidly growing problem.

UPDATE: Jeff B. put together a nifty Windows Mobile app for tip checksum calculations that’ll help make it easier to compute the proper tip given your level of service and checksumming method. Thanks Jeff!

I recently had to have a document notarized, so I stopped by the nearest package shipping store since such stores typically employ a notary public. After getting my single-page document notarized, I was surprised when the notary charged me $4.00. That’s because Maryland law specifically limits the fee I can be charged in this situation to $2.00. I was in a hurry, and the notary was a large, scary man who lifts heavy packages for a living, so I quickly shelled out my four bucks and was on my way. (I was also tempted to pay by credit card in defiance of his “Minimum of $5.00 for credit card purchases” sign, since card-accepting merchants cannot place minimums on card purchases under most merchant agreements with Visa, MasterCard, et al. But again, this guy was massive and looked like he hadn’t had lunch yet.)

I also recall a moment from my childhood when I was with a relative who needed something notarized and was charged $10.00 for a single page. What a rip-off! Well, the days of overcharging notaries are numbered because here’s a handy-dandy chart detailing the fees a notary public can charge in each state for a single-page notarization. There may be additional fees for more pages, copies, or other services, so I also link to each state’s notary division website which typically lists the applicable laws you can cite to make notaries cave to your demands to be charged fairly.

Maximum Fees Allowed For Most Single-Page, Single-Signature Notarizations By State*

*As of September 19, 2007 (If any of these fees change, please comment below and I’ll do my best to keep this table up to date.)
**States which specify no fee schedule for allowable notary charges typically also state that such fees charged should be reasonable.

Fees and laws associated with notary commissions can change at any time, so please check for the latest fees before you yell at your local notary public.

As for you notaries out there, be warned: many states provide for severe fines or even imprisonment for notarial misconduct. So unless you think a couple extra bucks is worth five to ten in the state penitentiary, make sure you charge fairly–even if you are an incredibly large man.