Belkin power bank settlement: What you need to know

Is there any one component of mobile tech that’s responsible for more anxiety than batteries? When we aren’t worried about the batteries in our phones catching fire, we’re worried about them losing capacity over time. At the very least, we’d love it if they accurately communicated their capacity to us, letting us know exactly what we can expect from them. Even that might be too big of an ask, though, and that issue is now core to a class-action settlement that could net Belkin customers a few bucks.

When you go shopping for a great power bank, you’re going to see a lot of numbers thrown at you, and maybe the most important one there is the total power capacity. Historically, that’s been expressed in terms of milliamp-hours (mAh). You’ll also see watt-hours (Wh) sometimes — an arguably more useful figure that doesn’t make assumptions about output voltage. But mAh is so ingrained as the popular metric here that a lot of us just lock onto that and use it exclusively as we compare models.

A few years back, though, some Belkin customers took issue with the fact that they weren’t getting all the power they expected out of their battery banks. While there’d be one mAh figure advertised, tests reportedly showed that the banks failed to deliver that much charge to target devices.

Some losses here are to be expected — when you use one battery to charge another, you’re not going to do so with 100% efficiency — but a class-action lawsuit (Miley v. Belkin International, Inc.) claimed discrepancies more like 40%, which seems a bit excessive. Anker disputes those claims, but ultimately doesn’t want this held up in court forever.

The company has now agreed to settle the suit, as well as change the way it advertises its power banks going forward. Top Class Actions reports that Belkin will specify that its mAh figures refer to the bank’s internal battery, and not the charge it’s capable of delivering.

Getting your cut of the settlement

OK, but what about that settlement money? Let’s start with some bad news: Only Californians are eligible for settlement payouts. We know, that probably excludes a whole ton of you reading this, but to be fair, it’s also the most populous state in the country, so it’s definitely still worth talking about.

Some better news: The timeframe covered by the settlement goes way back, so there’s a higher chance you may have purchased a qualifying device. If you bought a Belkin power bank between January 2, 2016 and April 16, 2024, it’s eligible.

And finally, back to some more bad news: You’re not going to get much out of this. Impacted customers can get a $5 Belkin voucher for their next purchase, or receive a $2 cash payout. Yeah, we know: Don’t spend it all in one place.