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All About T-Mobile Lawsuits

Learn what T-Mobile lawsuits are out there, and how to take action…

As one of the major phone and internet providers in America, T-Mobile serves million of customers but they also face lots of T-Mobile lawsuits.

Unfortunately, this also comes with plenty of instances where the company misbehaves, leading to lawsuits and other legal proceedings from consumers seeking justice.

Here are some T-Mobile lawsuits to know about:


Or, you can Start a Claim against T-Mobile now


1

Are lawsuits against T-Mobile allowed?

Like many legal questions, the answer is “it’s complicated.”

As with many other internet service providers, T-Mobile tries their best to ensure that their best interests are considered. Your T-Mobile subscriber agreement will often include language saying that you cannot sue them in most types of legal courts. However, consumers will always have the option to either take T-Mobile to a small claims court, or to file a consumer arbitration claim against them.

We’re biased, but consumer arbitration is often the better option. It’s also the one we can help with!

2

What is a Class Action Lawsuit? Can I file a Class Action Lawsuit against T-Mobile?

Class Action lawsuits against T-Mobile are designed to bring together a class of individuals with the same complaint. However, if you’re a T-Mobile customer, you often won’t have the option to file or join a class action.

Because of your T-Mobile contract, there will often be specific wording that prevents you from jumping into any Class Action that you find (this has not always been the case, and the story of why can be an interesting read).

The following T-Mobile lawsuits are usually lawsuits against T-Mobile filed by a government entity (which have more legal options than consumers), long-running older lawsuits, or corporate disputes involving T-Mobile.

At FairShake, we’re reinventing the T-Mobile lawsuit process. T-Mobile complaints are common, and many consumers often have the same questions regarding their legal rights with the company. Rather than going after a T-Mobile Class Action suit — which is usually not even possible — we’ll file a personalized legal document with the company, and guide you through the legal process.


Start Your Own Claim in Under 10 Minutes


3

As a T-Mobile customer, what are my options for a lawsuit?

There a bunch of ways to make a claim against T-Mobile, including with the FCC or your credit card provider.

But your legal options typically involve one of two paths:

  • You can Sue T-Mobile in Small Claims Court, and be asked to attend a court hearing and pay legal fees.

  • Or, you can do everything from your home. Consumer Arbitration is the process laid out by T-Mobile’s contract in place of a lawsuit. It lets you argue your case before an independent arbitrator (like a judge) who can force them to fix the problem and to compensate you. We at FairShake help make this process easy and convenient. Find out how


Watch: How to File an Official Claim against T-Mobile

While the lawsuits below are good information for any customer to have when dealing with T-Mobile, it’s likely your contract says you cannot sue T-Mobile, and have to use binding arbitration instead. FairShake can help you navigate arbitration and win compensation.

Start Your Claim Now


4

Nine recent and notable T-Mobile lawsuits:

T-Mobile Lawsuit over Early Termination Fees

T-Mobile has long branded themselves as different from other phone and internet companies, due to their lack of hidden fees and contracts.

However, according to Quartz, a 2016 lawsuit from a T-Mobile customer called out some of their seemingly deceptive cancellation claims: (Source)

The lawsuit, filed by a T-Mobile customer on April 15 and seeking class-action status, alleges that the company’s no-contract plans are deceptive. T-Mobile says the plans don’t have hidden fees, but there’s an early termination catch the company isn’t being forthright about, according to the lawsuit. Customers who terminate their services have to pay for the phones they bought from T-Mobile outright, even if they agreed to pay for them in installments.

[…]

The lawsuit argues that T-Mobile violated Florida consumer-collection laws and the state’s deceptive and unfair trade act by demanding full payment for the devices before it was due, and calls on other Florida residents with the same problem to come forward.

T-Mobile Lawsuit over Unauthorized Accounts

In early 2019, T-Mobile was facing litigation for charging a non-customer of the company for simply getting a quote for phone services, bringing back memories of the Wells Fargo “fake account” scandal.

Here’s a description from Big Law Business: (Source)

Patrick Ames sued T-Mobile under California consumer law after he gave the company his personal information to get a quote for telephone services. He decided not to buy a phone from the company but says the company charged him $46 for phone services.

He alleged the company had a practice of soliciting personal information from potential customers and using it to open unauthorized cell phone service accounts.

T-Mobile Lawsuit over Mobile Cramming

Mobile cramming, or charging consumers for third-party services that were not placed on the consumers’ phones purposefully, is a shady practice performed by some phone companies.

T-Mobile faced their own lawsuits from 50 state attorneys general regarding this practice recently, according to The Gardner News in 2015: (Source)

T-Mobile customers in Kansas who were charged for third-party services on their mobile phone bills without their consent are eligible to receive refunds as part of a multi-state settlement reached earlier this month.

The national settlement announced was reached between T-Mobile, the attorneys general of Kansas and 49 other states and the District of Columbia, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission. It includes a total payment of $90 million to resolve allegations that T-Mobile placed charges on consumers’ mobile phone bills for third-party services that had not been authorized by the consumer, a practice known as “mobile cramming.” This settlement follows a similar one reached with AT&T Mobility in October.

Under the terms of the settlement, T-Mobile is required to provide at least $67.5 million in refunds to consumers who were victims of cramming.

T-Mobile Lawsuit on Hackable Security Flaws

This story from ArsTechnica outlines a 2019 lawsuit against T-Mobile (as well as AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint) that revolves around the selling of customers’ location data to third-parties:
(Source)

The four major US wireless carriers are facing proposed class-action lawsuits accusing them of violating federal law by selling their customers’ real-time location data to third parties.

The complaints seeking class action status and financial damages were filed last week against AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint in US District Court for the District of Maryland.

[…]

The proposed classes would include all of the four carriers’ customers in the US between 2015 and 2019. In all, that would be 300 million or more customers, as the lawsuits say the proposed classes consist of at least 100 million customers each for AT&T and Verizon and at least 50 million each for Sprint and T-Mobile. Each lawsuit seeks damages for consumers “in an amount to be proven at trial.”

T-Mobile Lawsuit over Location Data Selling

According to Bitcoin Magazine, T-Mobile and AT&T have been involved with a number of questionable actions in the past.

This story outlines a suit where the two companies’ security systems were found to have major flaws, thus allowing for hackers to swoop in: (Source)

Leading cryptocurrency investor law firm Silver Miller Law has filed suit against cell phone giants AT&T and T-Mobile on behalf of several digital asset investors who were victims of the identity-theft tactic known as “SIM swapping.” The suit alleges that both companies possessed flaws in their security systems and failed to properly train their employees to work against hackers seeking to gain access to users’ smartphones.

SIM swapping occurs when a hacker gathers information on a potential victim, such as their phone password, answers to their security questions and their financial holdings. Once they have the data they need, the hacker will contact the person’s cell phone provider and claim that their SIM card has been lost or damaged and request that a new one be activated, with the end goal of accessing the victim’s finances — in this case, cryptocurrency.

T-Mobile Lawsuit on Social Media Age Discrimination

A press release from the Communications Workers of America tells the story of their lawsuit against T-Mobile and hundreds of other employers for deliberately targeting employment opportunities on social media towards younger Americans:
(Source)

Today, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and three workers filed a class action lawsuit against T-Mobile US, Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon), Cox Communications and Media Group (Cox), and hundreds of other large employers and employment agencies who allegedly engaged in the unlawful practice of excluding older workers from receiving job ads on Facebook for open positions at their companies. The lawsuit, which challenges how Facebook’s paid ad platform is allegedly being used to hide job ads and opportunities from older workers nationally, has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The case comes several days after the 50th anniversary of Congress passing the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which prohibited age discrimination in employment nationwide, raised public awareness of this widespread problem, and inspired state and local governments to enact similar legislation.

In the Complaint, CWA and the workers allege that, through an in-depth investigation, they have discovered that hundreds of employers and employment agencies are illegally targeting their employment ads on Facebook to exclude older workers who fall outside specified age ranges (such as ages 18 to 40, or ages 22 to 45), purposely preventing these older workers from seeing the ads or pursuing job opportunities. The Complaint alleges that this practice constitutes a violation of federal, state, and local laws that bar age discrimination in employment advertising, recruiting, and hiring.

T-Mobile faced major fines for faking phone call rings

This story from TechCrunch isn’t really a lawsuit, but it is a good example of deceptive technology practices that, if they weren’t detected by the FCC first, could have led to litigation or arbitration down the line:
(Source)

T-Mobile will pay $40 million as part of a settlement with the FCC for playing ringing sounds to mislead customers into thinking their calls were going through when in fact they had never connected in the first place. The company admitted it had done so “hundreds of millions” of times over the years.

The issue at hand is that when someone is trying to call an area with poor connectivity, it can sometimes take several seconds to establish a line to the other party — especially if a carrier itself does not serve the area in question and has to hand off the call to a local provider. That’s exactly what T-Mobile was doing, and there’s nothing wrong with it — just a consequence of spotty coverage in rural areas.

But what is prohibited is implying to the caller that their call has gone through and is ringing on the other end, if that’s not the case. Which is also exactly what T-Mobile was doing, and had been doing since 2007. Its servers began sending a “local ring back tone” when a call took a certain amount of time to complete around then.

T-Mobile Lawsuits Blocking Merger with Sprint

When two big companies propose a merger, there can always be a certain amount of pushback from different sources (including FairShake’s own team).

Although T-Mobile and Sprint appear close to a merger, multiple lawsuits from across the country are trying to prevent it, per The New York Times: (Source)

Executives at T-Mobile and Sprint have pitched the merger of their companies as a way for the country to greatly expand its 5G network, a priority for President Trump, who has argued that the widespread adoption of the technology is crucial to national security.

The $26 billion deal seemed to be moving forward in recent weeks, when the head of the Federal Communications Commission gave it his blessing. But on Tuesday, the plan hit a roadblock when a group of state attorneys general sued to block it.

The 10 officials who filed suit, all of them Democrats, said on Tuesday that if the merger went through, the prices consumers paid for phone plans would rise as the number of major wireless carriers dropped to three from four.

T-Mobile, the nation’s third-largest wireless company, and Sprint, the No. 4 carrier, have insisted they must get bigger to serve their customers better. A merger would reshape the telecommunications industry in the United States and create a formidable rival to the industry leaders, AT&T and Verizon, with each of the three serving roughly a third of the market.

T-Mobile Lawsuit Blocking Merger with AT&T

Remember that previous story of the blocked merger between T-Mobile and Sprint?

Well, that wasn’t the first time that such a huge merger has been proposed with T-Mobile, as seen in this 2011 lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice: (Source)

WASHINGTON – The Department of Justice today filed a civil antitrust lawsuit to block AT&T Inc.’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA Inc. The department said that the proposed $39 billion transaction would substantially lessen competition for mobile wireless telecommunications services across the United States, resulting in higher prices, poorer quality services, fewer choices and fewer innovative products for the millions of American consumers who rely on mobile wireless services in their everyday lives.

The department’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks to prevent AT&T from acquiring T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom AG.

“The combination of AT&T and T-Mobile would result in tens of millions of consumers all across the United States facing higher prices, fewer choices and lower quality products for mobile wireless services,” said Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole. “Consumers across the country, including those in rural areas and those with lower incomes, benefit from competition among the nation’s wireless carriers, particularly the four remaining national carriers. This lawsuit seeks to ensure that everyone can continue to receive the benefits of that competition.”








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