Contacting T-Mobile Customers on Fake Ring Tones ‘Proving Unreliable’: Plaintiffs

More than a year after the court "set in motion an action plan" to permit plaintiffs Craigville Telephone and Consolidated Telephone to contact T-Mobile subscribers who experienced fake ring tones, the plaintiffs “still have had no meaningful contact” with any of them, said the plaintiffs in a joint motion Wednesday (docket 1:19-cv-07190) in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago to resolve discovery disputes involving those consumer contacts.

T-Mobile is alleged to have inserted fake ring tones instead of connecting calls to rural areas in the U.S. that have expensive routing fees (see 2212230004). The fake tone would make the caller think the recipient didn’t answer, though the call hadn't been delivered.

U.S. mail isn’t “a reliable mode of contact” for contacting T-Mobile subscribers on the impact on them of the fake ring tones, said the plaintiffs. Relying on T-Mobile “for current and accurate U.S. mail contact information for the vast number of subscribers whose phone numbers appear in discovery documents has proven unreliable and unworkable,” they said. In light of the “contingencies” the court cited in its March 2022 order authorizing the plaintiffs to contact the T-Mobile subscribers by mail, the plaintiffs ask the court to revise the order “and implement the peer to peer text opt in method of contact” the plaintiffs previously proposed, they said.

T-Mobile’s production of customer contact information “has been ambiguous, confusing, and unreliable,” said the plaintiffs. The two spreadsheets with contact information that T-Mobile produced in January contain a total of more than 10,000 entries and “multiple columns of data with headings that defy explanation,” they said. “Even more confusing,” there are many instances where T-Mobile’s spreadsheets “list contact information for multiple individuals for the same phone number, in overlapping date ranges,” they said. This makes it impossible for the plaintiffs “to determine which customer they should contact,” they said.

T-Mobile produced a longer spreadsheet April 10 “to purportedly explain those instances where multiple names are listed for the same phone number during overlapping time periods,” said the plaintiffs. To confirm this, the plaintiffs must cross-reference the April 10 spreadsheet against the prior two voluminous spreadsheets to determine the dates when each individual was active on the account, they said. “But again, this data is proving unreliable,” they said.

The confusion created by T-Mobile’s information prejudiced the plaintiffs because they have been unable to send letters to customers “where there are multiple individuals assigned to a phone number in apparently overlapping periods,” said the plaintiffs in the joint motion. The plaintiffs haven’t sent letters to any customers associated with these phone numbers “to avoid making speculative choices as to which of the individuals should receive a letter based on the confusing data,” they said.

T-Mobile responded in the joint motion, arguing the plaintiffs’ renewed requests to contact subscribers by text rather than mail “do not overcome the legal and privacy considerations” the court evaluated “when it declined to permit contact by text the first time around.” The plaintiffs’ claim the customer contact information T-Mobile produced was unworkable is “contradicted” by the fact that the plaintiffs have already used this information to send letters to 94 T-Mobile customers, said the carrier. “They have offered no reason” to believe that, other than the handful of 10 letters marked returned to sender as undeliverable, “the letters did not reach their targets,” it said.

It’s not “the fault of the data that only one person responded” to those 94 letters, said T-Mobile. The minuscule response rate is due to factors outside of T-Mobile’s control, “including that the customers do not wish to engage with lawyers relating to a lawsuit in which they have no interest about years old phone calls or do not have any relevant information,” it said.

Any “supposed” data issues aren’t resolved by using text messages instead of the mail, said T-Mobile. The plaintiffs would still need to rely on T-Mobile’s customer data “to verify that phone numbers remain associated with the same customer who held the number at the time of the rural call complaints,” it said. The plaintiffs otherwise risk running afoul of the criteria listed in the March 2022 order “and could be contacting people who never made any complaint about rural call completion,” it said.