Plaintiffs Seek Emails, Skype Messages in T-Mobile Fake Ring Tone Case

Plaintiffs Craigville Telephone and Consolidated stepped up efforts to gather emails and Skype messages among individuals who knew about T-Mobile’s expansion of fake ring tones, said a Friday memorandum of law (1:19-cv-07190) in U.S. District Court for the Northern Division in Chicago.

The plaintiffs claim T-Mobile and Inteliquent injured them and other class members in multiple ways, including through lost opportunities to seek intercarrier compensation for calls the scheme blocked from connecting to their switches. They also allege the scheme masked failures by co-defendant Inteliquent, a cloud communications company, to complete billions of calls placed to rural and high-cost destinations, in an unlawful conspiracy under the 1964 Telecommunications Act.

Identifying all the employees who knew about T-Mobile’s alleged expansion of fake ring tones, and what they were told about it, “is relevant and proportional,” said the memo. T-Mobile identified employees who knew about the 2013 Rural Call Completion Order that banned the use of fake ring tones, but plaintiffs want to cross-reference employees who knew about the order vs. the universe of employees who knew T-Mobile was expanding its use of fake ring tones to establish “evidence of knowledge and intent” relative to conspiracy and punitive damages, it said.

T-Mobile has produced “minimal communications” about its 2015 expansion of fake ring tones, which it allegedly used instead of connecting calls to rural areas of the U.S. that have expensive routing fees. The fake tone would make the caller think the recipient didn’t answer, when the call wasn’t delivered, the plaintiffs allege. “The who, what, when, why and how” of T-Mobile’s “expansion of fake ring tones is not yet clear,” plaintiffs said.

There's a “very high probability” the additional communications sought about the expansion “will complete the story of how the fake ring tone expansion was accomplished,” plaintiffs said. Responses will shed light on whether third parties were involved, including Ericsson, software vendors, consultants or intermediate providers, they said.

In response to an interrogatory asking T-Mobile to explain actions it and Ericsson took to cause the fake ring tone expansion, T-Mobile identified no actions taken by Ericsson, even though documents produced by the FCC under the Freedom of Information Act show Ericsson implemented fake ring tones at T-Mobile’s direction, the memo said.

Plaintiffs sought information from Ericsson, which said much of it from the relevant time was no longer available. The court denied a motion to compel further electronic searches, saying it expected T-Mobile to provide such information, the memo said. T-Mobile took a “kitchen sink” approach to objections to producing responsive documents based on broad brush relevance and burden objections, but none of its objections has merit, asserted the plaintiffs.

The court should compel T-Mobile to electronically search for documents on plaintiffs’ various requests for production related to service credits T-Mobile was entitled to request from Inteliquent, if that company failed to satisfy contractually required service quality levels, said the memo. Those are relevant to “the co-conspirators’ agreement to engage in and tolerate poor call routing practices by Inteliquent while [T-Mobile's] use of fake ring tones was in place to mask it.”