Plaintiff Rebecca Kineman reached a settlement with TransUnion in her July fraud suit against Verizon Wireless, Fair Collections & Outsourcing (FCO) and major credit reporting agencies (see 2308010051), said a Monday notice (docket 6:23-cv-01437) in U.S. District Court for Middle Florida in Orlando. Verizon furnished inaccurate information about Kineman to Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, alleged the complaint. When she obtained copies of her credit reports in April with fraudulent information, she found the Verizon account in her name had a “closed” and "in collection" status with all the CRAs with a balance of $1,656; the “inaccurate and fraudulent” FCO account was reported by Experian and TransUnion with a status of “collection” and a balance of $59,195, it said. Kineman contacted the CRAs April 20 about the fraudulent accounts, attributing the reports to either a “mixed file or identity theft." The CRAs never tried to contact Kineman during the investigation and didn’t perform independent investigations, the complaint said. Kineman lost money and time attempting to fix her credit, experienced a reduction in her credit score and suffered mental anguish, stress, aggravation, embarrassment and “sleepless nights” due to defendants’ “reluctance to fix the errors,” the complaint said. Verizon was dismissed from the suit last month (see 2309130043.

Mullen Coughlin attorney Paulyne Gardner for Pension Benefit Information (PBI) submitted Terri Campbell v. Pension Benefit Information, LLC, and Does 1-20 as a related action in Re: MOVEit Customer Data Security Breach Litigation (docket 3083), said a Monday notice of related action (docket 2:23-cv-01545) before the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. Campbell’s class action asserts claims of negligence, invasion of privacy, breach of contract and breach of implied contract against PBI and the unnamed defendants involving a May data breach of Progress Software Corp.'s MOVEit file transfer software.

Plaintiffs B.K., N.Z. and R.P. added three causes of action in their privacy class action against Tenet’s Desert Care Network, in their first amended complaint (docket 2:23-cv-05021) Friday in U.S. District Court for Central California in Los Angeles. The California and Florida plaintiffs sued Tenet and its hospitals in California and Florida in June for collecting their confidential and private personal health information (PHI) -- including details about their medical conditions, treatments and providers sought, and appointments -- and then allegedly sending it to Facebook without prior, informed consent (see 2306260050). Defendants installed Facebook’s Meta Pixel tracking tool on their websites to intercept and send plaintiffs’ private information to third parties such as Facebook and Google, the complaint said. The Pixels track users as they navigate a website, logging which pages they visit, each button click and what information they provide on online forums, the complaint said. Pixels send information to Facebook via scripts running in a user’s internet browser so each data packet is labeled with an IP address that can be used with other data to identify a particular household, it said. In addition to claiming violations of California and Florida privacy and unfair competition laws, negligence, breach of contract and unjust enrichment, the amended complaint asserts two violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and breach of fiduciary duty. Meta Pixel tracking code on the medical companies’ websites tracks “extremely sensitive” PHI such as health conditions, including diabetes, diagnoses such as COVID-19 or AIDS, plus procedures, test results, treatment status, treating physician, allergies and personally identifiable information, it said.

Plaintiffs Dashawn Williams and Devon Holmes voluntarily dismissed without prejudice their July fraud complaint against Google, said a Thursday notice (docket 3:23-cv-03685) in U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Jose. The plaintiffs alleged Google charges advertisers a premium price for its TrueView video ads, and that the company receives inflated payments due to artificial views (see 2307260056). They alleged Google promises TrueView ads it places will run on high-quality sites, before a page’s main video content, with the audio on, “and that brands will only pay for ads that are not skipped,” the complaint said. Instead, they alleged, many TrueView ads are “displayed as muted, auto-playing videos either ‘out-stream’ or obscured on independent sites.”

Twitter and 50 “Doe” defendants to be named later failed to pay $362,250, including accrued interest, for information technology services rendered by plaintiff Sensor Tower, alleges a Friday breach of contract complaint (CGC-23-609396) in Superior Court of California in San Francisco. The plaintiff demanded payment Oct. 1, 2022, due by Nov. 30, 2022, under an amended subscription agreement dating to May 2018, but it didn't receive the payment, said the complaint. The sixth amendment to the agreement ended Saturday. The plaintiff also seeks attorney’s fees of $1,200.

The four defendants in the FTC’s lawsuit against fraud in the Amazon Prime subscription program plan to file two motions to dismiss under Federal Rules for Civil Procedure 12(b), said a stipulation and order, signed Friday (docket 2:23-cv-00932) by U.S. District Judge John Chun for Western Washington in Seattle, setting the briefing schedule on the motions to dismiss. One of the motions to dismiss will be filed on behalf of Amazon, the other on behalf of the three executives newly named in the commission’s Sept. 20 amended complaint (see [Ref:2309200069[), said Chun’s order. It adopts the briefing schedule proposed by the parties in their stipulation. The defendants will have until Oct. 18 to answer or otherwise respond to the amended complaint, with the FTC’s opposition to any motions to dismiss due by Nov. 17, said the order. The defendants’ replies in support of any motions to dismiss will be due Dec. 8, it said.

U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman for Northern California in San Jose recused herself from LinkedIn’s fraud case against the Bangladeshi website TopSocial24 because she found herself disqualified, said her signed order of recusal Wednesday (docket 5:23-cv-00110). She was reassigned the case only a day earlier from U.S. Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins. LinkedIn’s Jan. 10 complaint alleges TopSocial24 and owner Golam Mostafa engaged in unlawful acts of breach of contract, fraud and deceit, and intentional interference with contract. LinkedIn alleges the defendants sell inauthentic engagement on LinkedIn’s platform, including fake followers, fake comments, fake likes and fake connections, in violation of the LinkedIn user agreement (see 2301110025).

Former Pareteum Chief Financial Officer Edward O’Donnell and Victor Bozzo, the now-defunct telecom company’s former chief commercial officer, engaged in a fraudulent scheme between 2018 and mid-2019 to materially overstate company revenue, alleged the SEC in a complaint Thursday (docket 1:23-cv-08543) in U.S. District Court for Southern New York in Manhattan. The complaint alleges their misstatements resulted from improper accounting practices, where they recorded revenue for “unsupported, aspirational amounts” from nonbinding purchase orders. It additionally alleges O’Donnell acted to conceal the fraudulent practices from Pareteum’s outside auditor. O’Donnell allegedly interfered with the audit confirmation process, “inducing Pareteum customers to incorrectly confirm that they owed the amounts reflected in the audit confirmations,” despite knowing the confirmations weren’t accurate, said the complaint. “Unless the defendants are restrained and enjoined, they will engage in the acts, practices, transactions and courses of business” as set forth in the complaint, it said. Efforts to reach attorneys for O’Donnell and Bozzo were unsuccessful Friday.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals scheduled a telephonic mediation assessment conference Oct. 18 at 10:30 a.m. PDT in plaintiff-appellant Tracy McCarthy’s challenge of a district court’s ruling that her claims against Amazon Prime were time-barred, said a clerk’s order Wednesday (docket 23-35605). McCarthy alleges Amazon engaged in deceptive business practices when it provided “credits” as a “benefit” of being a Prime member (see 2309260004). When Prime members redeemed those credits for the audio versions of books they wanted to buy on Amazon, they were unknowingly enrolled in Audible for a continuous monthly fee without any clear and conspicuous notice of such enrollment, she alleges. In seeking to reverse the district court’s ruling that her claims under New York’s General Business Law were time-barred, McCarthy argues she was improperly charged a monthly fee for Audible within the three-year statute of limitations for GBL claims.

The FTC asserted Telemarketing Sales Rule and Telemarketing Act claims Wednesday against Lurn, CEO Anik Singal and the creators of two of Lurn’s most popular programs to halt them from duping consumers into buying products and services that falsely claim they can earn substantial income online. The FTC estimates the defendants took about $65 million from consumers between 2019 and May 2022 by using deceptive earnings claims, said its complaint (docket 8:23-cv-02622) in U.S. District Court for Maryland in Baltimore. Since at least 2009, and continuing through the present day, the defendants “engaged in a scheme to sell e-commerce programs and related products and services,” said the complaint. They market their programs and related products and services to consumers around the U.S. through the internet, email, YouTube, social media and telemarketing, it said. They falsely represent that their e-commerce programs “are tested and profitable systems consumers can easily use to generate significant income,” it said.