Plaintiff Is ‘Serial Filer of Cookie-Cutter Lawsuits,’ Says Mandry Motion to Dismiss
Mandry Technology Solutions moved for dismissal of plaintiff Dana Hughes’ privacy complaint, partly on grounds that she’s a “serial filer of cookie-cutter lawsuits,” according to Mandry’s memorandum of points and authorities Thursday (docket 2:23-cv-09502) in U.S. District Court for Central…
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California in Los Angeles in support of its motion to dismiss. Hughes alleges Mandry, a supplier of IT, cybersecurity and cloud strategy enterprise services, “secretly installed” spyware on its website from third-party Lead Forensics (see 2311120003). The spyware allows Mandry to “de-anonymize every anonymous visitor to the site” so that it knows each visitor's name, face, location, email and browsing history, her complaint said. But Hughes “alleges nothing about when she visited” Mandry’s website or what she did when she was there, according to the memorandum. She also doesn’t allege that Lead Forensics identified her, and alleges “no harm whatsoever,” because she has none, it said. The case is one of six that Hughes and her counsel, Robert Tauler of Tauler Smith in Los Angeles, have filed in the past two months alleging use of visitor identification software, it said. Each of the complaints pleads “near verbatim allegations arising from a website operator’s alleged collection of innocuous information” that asserts claims of an “unlawful computer hack,” said the memorandum. The complaints merely swap in “different defendants and websites,” it said. Hughes’ “cut-and-paste job belies the lack of merit to her claims,” it added. “Litigation tactics aside,” Hughes’ claims “fail for multiple reasons,” said the memorandum. “As a threshold matter,” Mandry isn’t subject to personal jurisdiction in California, it said. The complaint also should be dismissed under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(5) for insufficient service of process, it said. Her claims also fail on the merits, it said. She alleges “no tangible harm” under the California Comprehensive Computer Access and Fraud Act, plus she hasn’t alleged an “access” or “hack” in violation of the statute, it said. Her request for punitive damages also must be dismissed because she makes “no attempt to plead relief to punitive damages with particularity, as the law requires,” it said.