Sprint Nextel Hit With Class Action Lawsuit Over Content Charges
By James Quintana Pearce - Mon 12 May 2008 02:24 PM PST
A class action lawsuit has been filed against Sprint (NYSE: S) Nextel alleging it is charging customers for mobile content they didn’t authorize buying, and deliberately befitting from the practice reports RCR News. The wording is almost exactly the same as the lawsuit filed against Alltel last month. The Kansas City Star has some further details, noting the suit was filed by California resident James Peetz after he received “unsought “premium” text messages from Kepler & Associates LLC, doing business as JokeMobi, a third-party provider of mobile content”, and was moved to the Federal Court by Sprint last Thursday. The article claims this case is “one of several dozen similar class-actions filed across the country against the nation’s largest wireless carriers”, which is unsurprising...I think it’s only a matter of time before other operators face similar lawsuits.
One interesting paragraph: “In its notice moving the case to federal court, Sprint said that, in a single quarter in 2007, the nation’s wireless carriers made more than $273 million off of premium mobile content. That translates into nearly $1.1 billion a year. Assuming Sprint’s share of that market equals its 23 percent share of the overall wireless market, its mobile content revenues last year would have totaled about $230 million.”
Posted in: Companies, Operators, SprintNextel, Legal
