Magistrate Judge Recommends Compelling ECPA Claims vs. T-Mobile to Arbitration

T-Mobile’s motion to compel Samuel Whatley's claims to arbitration for alleged Electronic Communications Privacy Act and Electronic Funds Transfer Act violations should be granted and Whatley’s complaint dismissed in full, said U.S. Magistrate Judge Mary Gordon Baker for South Carolina in Charleston in her signed report and recommendation Wednesday (docket 2:23-cv-01339). The pro se plaintiff alleges a T-Mobile employee unlawfully transferred his phone number to another unauthorized device and in so doing compromised his entire bank account (see 2404170005). He responded to T-Mobile’s motion to compel with a countermotion for summary judgment against the defendant. Whatley entered into a service agreement and its arbitration provisions when he opened his T-Mobile account in 2017, said Baker’s report. He doesn’t contest the arbitration provisions or claim that they don’t cover his dispute with the carrier, it said. Instead, he contends that his signatures on the service agreement were unnotarized, undated and forged, and on that basis, he claims that no legally binding or recognized arbitration agreement exists, it said. But Baker finds Whatley’s claims “unconvincing,” said her report. As T-Mobile correctly notes, there’s no requirement that a signature to a contract be notarized or dated, it said. The law merely requires assent, it said. The plaintiff’s claims that his signatures were forged “are also unconvincing,” it said. Whatley provides “only bare assertions to support these claims, and the record is devoid of any evidence to substantiate them,” it said. His “self-serving assertions, without more, cannot dispel the substantial record evidence showing that he agreed to arbitrate the claims at issue here,” it said.