Judge Lets Fake Ring Tone Plaintiffs Send 75 Texts to Affected T-Mobile Customers
U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Gilbert for Northern Illinois in Chicago signed an order Tuesday (docket 1:19-cv-07190) authorizing plaintiffs Craigville Telephone and Consolidated Telephone to contact T-Mobile customers by text on the impact to them of the fake ring tones that…
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T-Mobile is alleged to have inserted instead of connecting calls to rural areas in the U.S. that have expensive routing fees (see 2212230004). The fake ring tones made callers think the recipients didn’t answer, though the calls never were delivered. More than a year after the court set in motion an “action plan" to permit Craigville and Consolidated to contact T-Mobile subscribers by mail who may have experienced the fake ring tones, the plaintiffs have had no meaningful contact with any of those customers due to the inefficiencies of contacting those customers by mail, the plaintiffs told the court in April (see 2304270023). Gilbert’s amended order permits the plaintiffs now to send up to 75 text messages to T-Mobile customers who satisfy the criteria prescribed in the court’s Dec. 19 order for being contacted by mail, including that they needed to have been T-Mobile subscribers between October 2013 and April 2018 when the unlawful conduct allegedly took place. The plaintiffs may send the texts through a peer-to-peer service, but can’t use an automatic telephone dialing system, nor a system with the capacity to use a random or sequential number generator to store or produce phone numbers to be called, said the amended order. Those terms appeared designed to bar court-ordered practices that risk violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, though the order didn’t expressly spell that out. The meticulously phrased 165-word text that the plaintiffs were ordered to comply with instructs recipients that they aren’t required to answer the texts or take any action in response, but prompts them to reply YES to consent to a phone call from a lawyer representing the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs may contact by phone only those customers who respond YES to the text message, said the order.