The Government has been accused of trying to save costs by "short-changing" victims of the infected blood scandal.
A 45-year-old woman who was infected with hepatitis C by the NHS at the age of 11 has said the Government's lump sum offer was almost 90 per cent short of what was expected.
A charity said the Government "was hoping to save costs by setting up barrier after barrier" to the compensation for those with hepatitis.
Rishi Sunak, the former prime minister, declared last May when the infected blood inquiry was published that it was a "day of shame for the British state" and pledged to "pay whatever it costs" to compensate the 30,000 victims.
Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, announced in the autumn Budget that the Government would set aside £11.8 billion to compensate those affected.
But 10 months after Sir Brian Langstaff's final report into the scandal, £25 million has been paid to 22 people, according to the latest figures.
A further 16 victims have had offers, and one of them, Adella, has told The Telegraph the lump sum offer is vastly different to what was promised on last year's "day of shame".
She said the Government had reneged on a commitment to ensure any lump sum offer was not worth less than the lifetime payment support victims currently receive.
Adella was one of the first to receive her offer at the end of February but the figure of £377,000 was well below what had been expected.
She was diagnosed with hepatitis C aged 18, having contracted it during a blood transfusion seven years earlier, and lived with the condition for about two decades before a treatment that worked became available.
She said the offer provided "no meaningful choice" because she receives almost £36,000 per year in support - which increases with the consumer price index of about 3 per cent per year. And if she opted to continue that, she would also receive £55,000 upfront, resulting in a greater total figure within about eight years.
"We were informed that nobody will be worse off than had they continued with their lifetime support payments. That this compensation was going to replace that, and that would draw a line under all of this," she said.
"They were saying that they were going to accelerate the support payments into one life-changing lump sum. If I have 40 years of my life left at £35,000 [per year], it's £2 million of money. I would have been happy walking away with that kind of money, because that is life changing, right?"
But when the offer came through, instead of having a lump sum equivalent to lifetime support payments, the amount on offer was significantly discounted, she said, even accounting for an inflation-linked reduction.
She said she was "absolutely shocked" and thought it must be an "error". "The Government had promised that we would be no worse off than I am. In fact, they've not really given me much compensation at all," she added.
Her husband said the Labour Government had not just backtracked but "reversed the promise" to top-up a lump sum offer so that victims would not get less upfront, instead prioritising the "elderly and terminally ill".
He also said the calculations behind the compensation were "so opaque and complicated" that it suggested "the government didn't know the scale of the bill that they were going to face".
Rachel Halford, chief executive of the Hepatitis C Trust, said those infected with hepatitis and exposed to "awful treatments that caused lifelong health damage" were only being offered about £5,000 per year "for all of the trauma, the sickness, the loss of work life and family life".
She said it had all the "hallmarks of a system developed in secret and without engagement of the people impacted".
"It is hugely complex, has no freedom to address individual hardship, and demands huge quantities of evidence. It appears worryingly like the Government is hoping to save costs by setting barrier after unnecessary barrier to compensation, at the expense of people given hepatitis B and C. This is harming the very people this compensation system was intended to help," she added.
All victims of the scandal were given an interim compensation payment of £310,000 last year. More than 30,000 people who received NHS treatment between the 1970s and early 1990s were infected with contaminated blood and many contracted viruses including hepatitis C and HIV, and are eligible for compensation. At least 3,000 of these people have died.
The Government had promised to make the compensation offers, which are being delivered by the Infected Blood Compensation Authority (IBCA), as simple as possible.
However, the maths involved in the offer include complicated sums that incorporate various elements of past and future financial loss as well as care costs, but that simultaneously do not differentiate between the age of the victim, or when they were first diagnosed, which Adella claims is discriminating against the youngest victims.
The Government also withdrew its initial plan to include a supplementary route for more complex cases and to "personalise" the compensation offers - and it has tightened the rules for victims to apply for the "special category mechanism" to include only those with the most "rare severe health conditions".
The Government had initially proposed to end lifetime support payments when it promised that no victims would be worse off with a lump-sum, but said it had listened to calls from those impacted to keep the option for support payments open.
Adella said the lifetime payments were "never supposed to be compensation" and she did not "trust that these support payments are going to carry on" in the long run.
The lump-sum compensation figure is based upon the IBCA giving Adella a healthy life expectancy of 89.
She said the compensation offer was also unfair in light of her specific circumstances, versus someone who had been diagnosed with the virus last year, for example, who would be entitled to the same money.
"After what I've gone through in my life, from getting it as a child, living my entire life with hepatitis C, and having to tell boyfriends, having to have two children in the process, and the fear of passing it on to my children, the fear of telling people," she said.
"They're just playing roulette with my life, quite frankly, and hoping that I'll pop off sooner than 89."
So far more than 200 people have been invited to start the claim process and 38 offers have been made. The lump sums on offer are in addition to the £310,000 interim payment, which together, provide the total compensation offer.
A government spokesman said: "This government listened to feedback from the community and made changes to the compensation scheme, ensuring claimants have the option to receive support scheme payments for life if they wish.
"While no amount of compensation will make up for the suffering people have endured, we have so far paid over £25 million in compensation payments and over a billion pounds in interim payments.
"Furthermore, the budget set aside £11.8bn to compensate victims of infected blood and address the scale of this injustice."