T-Mobile Presses Its Argument to Compel Customer’s ECPA Claims to Arbitration

Samuel Whatley should be required to arbitrate his Electronic Communications Privacy Act and Electronic Funds Transfer Act claims against T-Mobile to arbitration, said the defendant’s reply Tuesday (docket 2:23-cv-01339) in U.S. District Court for South Carolina in Charleston in support of its March 27 motion to compel (see 2403280037). Pro se plaintiff Whatley alleges a T-Mobile employee unlawfully transferred his phone number to another unauthorized device and in so doing compromised his entire bank account. He responded to T-Mobile’s motion to compel with a countermotion for summary judgment against T-Mobile. But Whatley’s opposition “fails to refute the evidence” in T-Mobile’s motion to compel that he “repeatedly assented” to its terms and conditions, which require arbitration of his dispute with T-Mobile, said the defendant’s reply. The plaintiff’s "conclusory assertion" that his arbitration agreements aren’t legally binding “are not supported by any testimony or other evidence, and not enough to avoid arbitration,” it said. Whatley’s arguments that his unnotarized or undated signatures can’t show that he agreed to T-Mobile’s terms “are not well founded,” it said. He identifies “no requirement that a signature to a contract needs to be notarized or dated, it said. The law “merely requires assent, as opposed to formalities such as notarization,” it said. Whatley appears to challenge one of his signed arbitration agreements as a forgery, it said. But as courts have repeatedly held, “these types of unsupported allegations that an arbitration agreement was procured by fraud are insufficient to avoid arbitration,” it said. Even if the plaintiff could identify a "valid objection" to arbitration, which he hasn't, the parties “delegated all issues of arbitrability to the arbitrator to decide in the first instance,” T-Mobile said.