A hacker, with the help of a Verizon store assistant manager, gained access to a customer’s financial accounts through a SIM card swap, stealing $300,000 from his cryptocurrency account, alleged a fraud complaint Tuesday (docket 1:23-cv-09556) in U.S. District Court for Southern New York in Manhattan. The breach of contract suit names Verizon and Coinbase as co-defendants.
For more than 20 years, plaintiffs Best Payphones, Northeastern Telecom and Paramount Financial Recovery contended that the payphone service rates that defendant Verizon charged between 1997 and 2006 didn’t comply with FCC regulations, said Verizon and co-defendant MetTel in their memorandum of law Monday (docket 1:23-cv-04935) in U.S. District Court for Southern New York in Manhattan in support of their motion to dismiss the complaint. The claims lack merit and are time barred, it said.
The class-action allegations of 38 AirTag user plaintiffs are “a misplaced effort to hold Apple legally responsible for third parties’ intentional misuse of its AirTag product” to track the plaintiffs or their family members without their consent, said Apple’s memorandum of points and authorities Friday (docket 3:22-cv-07668) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Francisco in support of its motion to dismiss the Oct. 6 first amended complaint.
The seven residents of Belmar, New Jersey, who previously asked to intervene in Verizon’s complaint to force Monmouth County’s approval of an application to install nine small wireless facilities (SWFs) in the public rights of way (ROW) (see 2309280027) now seek dismissal of Verizon’s complaint, said their motion Tuesday (docket 3:23-cv-18091) in U.S. District Court for New Jersey in Trenton.
Core Communications can’t collect the millions in unpaid switched access service charges it seeks from AT&T, because Core’s tariffs didn’t authorize it to bill for those services in the first place (see 2212280001), making AT&T entitled to summary judgment on all of Core’s claims, said a signed memorandum Friday (docket 2:21-cv-02771) from U.S. District Judge Joshua Wolson for Eastern Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He denied as moot Core’s motion for summary judgment against AT&T. In a game of telephone, “the problems don’t come from the people at either end of the call, but from “the jumble in the middle,” said Wolson’s memorandum. “This case is about a game of telephone in real life, if you had to pay everyone along the chain,” it said. Core and its affiliates in Delaware, New Jersey, Virginia and West Virginia have had tariffs in place since 2011 to provide switched access services. Core bills AT&T for those services, but AT&T stopped paying Core in 2018, contending nearly all Core’s call traffic was spoofed or fraudulent. Core can’t collect the originating access charges it seeks from AT&T because Core didn’t provide switched access services under its tariff when it routed those calls to AT&T, said the memorandum. All the charges Core seeks AT&T payment on “stem from the origination of 8YY calls,” and there’s no dispute that the 8YY traffic was toll-free, meaning the callers didn’t pay a fee to make the calls, it said. Core acknowledged it charged AT&T for the 8YY traffic it routed to AT&T between July 2017 and June 2021, and no upstream providers paid any fees for the service, it said. This means none of the 8YY callers, nor any of the originating providers, “can be a Company End User” because they didn’t pay Core a fee to use its local exchange or other telecommunications services, said the memorandum. In fact, Core paid the originating providers to acquire the 8YY traffic, it said. In addition, AT&T’s customers who received these calls didn’t pay a fee to Core, it said. Instead, they paid AT&T for toll-free service.
Eisenhower Medical Center installed Facebook’s Meta Pixel tracking tool and other third-party tracking technology on its web properties in order to send users' private information to third parties such as Facebook or Google, allege plaintiffs B.K. and N.Z. in a Thursday privacy class action (docket 5:23-cv-02092) in U.S. District Court for Central California in Riverside.
The plaintiffs who seek to hold Apple liable for the fraud involving Toast Plus, a third-party app on the App Store, can’t “circumvent” Section 230’s protections through creative pleading, said a amicus brief filed Tuesday in the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals (docket 22-16514) by NetChoice, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Software & Information Industry Association in support of Apple’s request to affirm the district court’s dismissal of the case. The Chamber of Progress and ACT | The App Association also signed onto the brief.
A fraudulent Best Buy Geek Squad email enabled defendants to defraud Florida husband and wife plaintiffs of $69,335, said their racketeering and fraud complaint (docket 1:23-cv-23756) Monday in U.S. District Court for Southern Florida in Miami. The lawsuit names Zhenzhen Lin, “unknown conspirators,” Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Best Buy.
Plaintiffs B.K., N.Z. and R.P. added three causes of action in their privacy class action against Tenet’s Desert Care Network, in their first amended complaint (docket 2:23-cv-05021) Friday in U.S. District Court for Central California in Los Angeles. The California and Florida plaintiffs sued Tenet and its hospitals in California and Florida in June for collecting their confidential and private personal health information (PHI) -- including details about their medical conditions, treatments and providers sought, and appointments -- and then allegedly sending it to Facebook without prior, informed consent (see 2306260050). Defendants installed Facebook’s Meta Pixel tracking tool on their websites to intercept and send plaintiffs’ private information to third parties such as Facebook and Google, the complaint said. The Pixels track users as they navigate a website, logging which pages they visit, each button click and what information they provide on online forums, the complaint said. Pixels send information to Facebook via scripts running in a user’s internet browser so each data packet is labeled with an IP address that can be used with other data to identify a particular household, it said. In addition to claiming violations of California and Florida privacy and unfair competition laws, negligence, breach of contract and unjust enrichment, the amended complaint asserts two violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and breach of fiduciary duty. Meta Pixel tracking code on the medical companies’ websites tracks “extremely sensitive” PHI such as health conditions, including diabetes, diagnoses such as COVID-19 or AIDS, plus procedures, test results, treatment status, treating physician, allergies and personally identifiable information, it said.
Ocean City, New Jersey, denies U.S. District Court for New Jersey in Camden, has subject matter jurisdiction over Verizon’s claims because its action wasn’t commenced in a timely manner, said the city’s answer Friday (docket 1:23-cv-04370). Verizon alleges the city violated Section 704 of the Communications Act by effectively prohibiting Verizon’s provision of personal wireless services and because it denied the application without substantial evidence contained in the written record, it said (see 2308140028).