Customer Sues T-Mobile After Employee Posts Her Intimate Photos During Phone Upgrade

A T-Mobile employee downloaded, without the customer's consent, the private images and videos from a cellphone that customer had traded in, alleged a Nov. 17 negligence complaint (docket 4:23-cv-05166) in Washington Superior Court that removed Wednesday to U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington in Richland.

Plaintiff Jane Doe went to the T-Mobile store in Columbia Center Mall in Kennewick, Washington, on Oct. 22, 2022, to upgrade her iPhone, said the complaint. Employee De'aundre Gomez offered to migrate Doe’s data from her old phone to the new one, and while doing so, “secretly stole intimate images and videos of Jane off her phone and distributed them,” it said. Gomez accessed her old phone without authorization, “hacked into a social media account,” and using the plaintiff’s Snapchat account, “distributed nude images and a sex video” of her on Snapchat, it said.

When Doe returned to the store that night with her mother, “the employees and managers engaged in a cover-up, falsely claiming there had been no trade-ins that day,” the complaint said. After “additional advocacy” by Doe, her mother, local police and mall security, her old phone was found in the back room of the store, “obviously tampered with,” the complaint said.

The store manager, rather than helping Doe “in the face of the sexual privacy crime,” said if she wanted the old phone back, she would have to pay the amount they had discounted her for the trade-in, the complaint said. Doe’s mother paid the amount, it said.

The T-Mobile phone migration process requires that consumers provide instruction to a staff member to unlock their phones so that the data to be migrated is accessible to them, said the complaint. T-Mobile “is aware that this process creates privacy vulnerabilities,” it said. The carrier has “long known and turned a blind eye to its retail store employees routinely abusing their access to customers' most intimate information stored on their devices,” the complaint said, referencing similar lawsuits in New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, Florida and Colorado, along with news reports.

Despite knowing about “regular violations of customer privacy by its retail employees,” T-Mobile has “neglected to improve its policies or procedures to hire and supervise responsible employees or to impose checks and balances via technology and store surveillance to deter or recognize unlawful incidents,” said the complaint.

Though T-Mobile’s privacy notices state the company has “procedures in place to make sure that only the primary account holder or authorized users have access” to customers' data, when Doe checked her social media accounts on her new phone -- after providing the store access to her old one for the data transfer -- she discovered that an unauthorized person had accessed her Snapchat account. That person “disseminated explicit photos of Jane in lingerie, nude” and having sexual intercourse with her partner, it said. The content had been stored on her old phone, the complaint said.

The Kennewick Police Department executed a warrant on Snapchat and determined that the account that posted the photos from Doe's old phone belonged to Gomez; location data pinned the download location of the images to the Columbia Center Mall, the complaint said. Gomez was charged with first degree computer trespass, a felony, and disclosing intimate images; he pleaded guilty on Oct. 19 of this year, it said.

The plaintiff asserts claims of negligence; intrusion upon solitude or seclusion; outrage; negligent misrepresentation and negligent hiring and retention; violations of the Uniform Civil Remedies for Unauthorized Disclosure of Intimate Images, Consumer Protection and Computer Fraud and Abuse acts, sexual harassment; and a civil action relating to disclosure of intimate images, said the complaint. Doe seeks punitive, actual and treble damages, declaratory and injunctive relief and attorneys’ fees, it said.

A T-Mobile spokesperson emailed Thursday: "This was an employee of a third-party authorized retailer, and he was terminated. While we are unable to comment on the specifics of this pending case, we want to underscore that we take customer protection and issues like this very seriously. We have policies and procedures in place to protect customer information and expect them to be followed."