Amazon filed its first criminal complaint in Italy, its first civil suit in Spain, plus 10 other legal actions against bad actors in the U.S. to curb the spread of fake reviews, the company said Thursday. The lawsuits collectively target more than 11,000 websites and social media groups “that attempt to orchestrate fake reviews on Amazon and other stores in exchange for money or free products,” it said. The criminal complaint in Italy targets a “high-profile broker” selling fake reviews who claims to have built a network of individuals willing to buy products on Amazon and post five-star reviews in exchange for full refunds, said the company. Amazon spoke the same day the FTC announced it will explore a rulemaking to combat fake reviews and will seek comments “on the harms and pervasiveness of fake and paid reviews, and other deceptive endorsement tactics.”

U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel for Western Texas in Austin signed an order Thursday granting AT&T’s unopposed motion for a deadline extension to Nov. 21 to answer the Sept. 19 Communications Workers of America complaint to compel arbitration for DirecTV employees who CWA alleges were “unjustly” terminated during the summer of 2021 (see 2210090002). CWA contends the workers are entitled to a grievance process under an existing collective bargaining agreement.

Whisl Telecom, one of the defendants in Marriott International’s trademark infringement lawsuit to stop robocallers from allegedly impersonating Marriott telemarketers (see 2210140035), filed a motion Thursday in U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia to compel the hotel company to give “full and complete responses” to Whisl’s first set of discovery requests. Marriott and Whisl lawyers held a three-hour “meet-and-confer” conference Oct. 13 over Microsoft Teams involving Marriott’s “deficient discovery responses and document production,” said the motion. Marriott lawyers agreed at the conference they would let Whisl’s attorneys know by Oct. 17 if the company “intended to stand on all its objections and would not be providing any supplemental discovery responses or document production,” the motion said. “Marriott never communicated with Whisl regarding the outstanding discovery issues,” despite additional “follow-up requests,” and that necessitated the motion to compel, it said.

The U.S. District Court in Central California should deny plaintiff Serena Fleites’ request “for issuance of overbroad, burdensome, and improper discovery requests to a group of foreign, non-party accounting entities operating under the Grant Thornton name,” said MindGeek and its affiliated defendants in an opposition brief Wednesday (docket 2:21-cv-04920). Fleites sued the company and its affiliated defendants in May 2021, alleging the owner of the video hosting site Pornhub ran one of the largest trafficking ventures in the world, including victimizing thousands of minors for their own financial profit. Her suit alleged that MindGeek “solicited, optimized, commercialized, and monetized” her child sexual abuse material on its tube sites and stonewalled her efforts “to have this illegal content removed so that they could continue to profit.” She further alleged that MindGeek and its affiliates “carried out and hid their trafficking venture through the creation of hundreds of sham subsidiaries and affiliates located in dozens of jurisdictions throughout the world,” which is why she’s asking for “international judicial assistance” for the discovery process. Fleites “is not permitted to burden non-parties with requests for information that can be obtained from Defendants,” said MindGeek. “Non-party discovery is generally only appropriate when a party has attempted and failed to obtain the information sought from the opposing party.” The court should not allow Fleites “to rope foreign diplomats and nonparties into this action with improper discovery demands,” it said.

Samsung served notice Tuesday on the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) of three potential “tag-along” class actions alleging the company was negligent when its midsummer data breach exposed to hackers the personally identifiable information (PII) of millions of account holders. “All of the potential tag-along actions involve common questions of law and fact with the actions currently under consideration for transfer” to the U.S. District Court for Northern California, said Samsung’s notice (case No. 3005). The three new cases “should be considered as related actions for purposes of this pending multidistrict litigation,” it said. The three new complaints would bring to a dozen the total number of class actions alleging Samsung should be held accountable for the PII that fell into the possession of bad actors. Plaintiffs in the previous nine class actions asked the JPML to consolidate all the cases under the watch of U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in San Francisco (see 2210140042). Responses are due Nov. 2, replies by Nov. 9, to the plaintiffs’ Oct. 7 motion for transfer and consolidation of the various class actions.

U.S. District Judge Nina Wang in Denver signed an order Tuesday terminating the Pac-12 Network’s breach of contract complaint alleging that Dish Network’s demand to return license fees to compensate for the COVID-19-shortened 2020 college football season was contrary to their license agreement (see 2210070043). The Pac-12 filed a notice of voluntary dismissal Oct. 13, two days after Wang issued a show cause order (docket 1:22-cv-02620) indicating that the allegations in the complaint were insufficient for the court “to assure itself of diversity jurisdiction in this case.”

T-Mobile is “temporarily enjoined” from releasing under subpoena to the House Jan. 6 Select Committee the phone records of Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward, “pending our resolution of the motion for injunction pending appeal,” said the 9th Circuit U.S. Appeals Court in an order late Tuesday (docket 22-16473). “By this order we express no opinion as to the merits of this pending motion for injunction,” said the three-judge panel of Barry Silverman, Sandra Ikuta and Eric Miller. T-Mobile said it told Ward it had planned to turn over the records Wednesday (see 2210180003). The committee said it needs Ward’s phone records for its investigation into her efforts to thwart the certification of the 2020 election. Ward, a practicing physician, argued that the subpoena violated her First Amendment associational rights and would breach doctor-patient confidentiality. U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa in Phoenix twice denied Ward’s motion for an injunction to quash the subpoena on grounds she didn’t prove irreparable harm.

Private civil litigation is “now a probability, not a possibility,” after a major data breach, warned the Quinn Emanuel law firm Friday. It counted 36 major data breach class actions as having been filed in 2021, a 44% increase from 2020, it said: “Private plaintiffs typically race to the courthouse to jockey for position, with complaints now brought on average within four weeks of a breach announcement.” Defendants should expect to see “novel injury theories with increasing frequency as data breach law continues to mature,” it said. Litigation exposure “will be difficult to gauge in the near term, especially given the dearth of clear precedent and material differences in both the standing and merits analyses undertaken by different jurisdictions,” it said. Litigation risk will also increase as data breaches become more prevalent and affect greater numbers, “as even nominal damages -- when aggregated -- can produce extraordinary recoveries,” it said. Though most data breach cases are brought on behalf of plaintiffs whose personally identifiable information was actually or potentially accessed, “spillover into other areas is likely,” it said: “Shareholders may increasingly seek to hold executives and board members liable for failing to adopt ‘reasonable security measures’ to prevent cybercrime.”

Frontier Communications, Southern New England Telco and SNET America are seeking a default judgment against Mobi Telecom over robocalls, said a motion filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Connecticut in docket 3:22-cv-0021. Mobi “has failed to answer the Complaint despite many months having elapsed after the response deadline,” the filing said. The complaint in the case was filed in February, and responses were due in March. Mobi “intentionally routes, facilitates, and permits illegal robocalls to be sent to Plaintiffs’ landline telephone services customers,” said a memorandum in support of the motion. The plaintiffs said they can’t locate Mobi’s owner and the company is a “shell” without employees or a physical location. “The FCC has found evidence that Defendant is implicated in a large scale, illegal robocalling scheme,” the motion said. “However, there has been no indication to date that Defendant has responded to or taken any measures requested of the FCC.” The plaintiff companies are seeking $100,000 and an injunction against future robocalls.

The deadline for filing a joint status letter in the SEC’s March 2021 complaint against AT&T was extended to Oct. 31, said an order signed Thursday by U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer in U.S. District Court in Manhattan (docket 1:21-cv-01951). Engelmayer received a joint request from the parties for the delay, his order said. The SEC alleges AT&T, “aided and abetted” by three executives in its investor relations department, violated the commission’s fair disclosure rules.