T-Mobile’s Claims Lack Teeth, WCO Brief Says in Support of Motion to Dismiss

Most people who have suffered no harm don’t file “eight-figure federal racketeering lawsuits,” said defendant WCO Spectrum’s reply brief Friday (docket 2:23-cv-04347) in U.S. District Court for Central California in Los Angeles in support of its motion to dismiss T-Mobile’s fraud complaint. For T-Mobile, “the calculus is different,” said the reply. T-Mobile alleges that WCO conspired with five co-defendants to form an illegal enterprise in which they made “sham offers” to schools to buy their educational broadband service spectrum licenses (see 2306030002). T-Mobile’s 59-plus-page complaint and its opposition to the motion to dismiss, doesn’t “once allege” that it’s worse off financially than it would have been but for the defendants’ alleged actions, said the reply. T-Mobile insists that, if not for the defendants’ supposed fraud, it would never have bought the wireless spectrum licenses at issue in this case, and instead would have continued leasing them, it said. But T-Mobile doesn’t allege that the licenses “are worth less than what it paid for them, or that buying them has put it in a worse position than leasing,” it said. To the contrary, the complaint suggests that owning the licenses “has been a boon to T-Mobile, enabling it to avoid a future increase in lease rates,” it said. That “stark omission” is fatal to T-Mobile’s case, said the reply. All of T-Mobile’s claims under the RICO statute and California law “require pleading and proof that the plaintiff has suffered actual harm at the hands of the defendant,” it said. So does Article III, it said. But T-Mobile “alleges no actual harm,” it said. Its only theory of loss, that it would have been even better off if it had been induced to buy the licenses, but at a lower price, “is a nonstarter,” it said. That’s because T-Mobile “makes clear that was never going to happen,” it said. As the 9th Circuit explained earlier this month, a plaintiff can’t state a claim “by complaining that it was tricked into entering a deal in which it received exactly what it bargained for, at exactly the price it was willing to pay,” it said.