Florida’s Banu alleged that AT&T failed to put in place adequate safeguards to prevent a group of hackers known as ShinyHunters from accessing that data and selling personal information for profit, then the company repeated an earlier mistake by not informing consumers that their identities were at risk for theft for up to three years.
Banu claims she was not informed that her data had been included in the breach until April 25, and then discovered that an unauthorised person had opened a bank account in her name, which she had to spend time investigating and trying to have closed.
The lawsuit seeks class-action status for all U.S. residents whose personal information was exposed as a result of the data breach.
“Using the personal information accessed in the data breach, data thieves are already selling the data on the dark web and engaging in identity theft and fraud,” Banu said in the complaint. “Going forward, criminals may and likely will commit a variety of crimes, including opening new financial accounts in the names of Class Members, taking out loans in the names of Class Members, using Class Members’ information to obtain government benefits, using Class Members’ information to file fraudulent tax returns, obtaining driver’s licenses in the names of Class Members using photographs of other people, and providing false information to police when making arrests.”
June 2024 AT&T Data Breach Lawsuit Update
Given the common questions of fact and law raised in complaints filed across the federal court system, the U.S. Judicial Joint Multidistrict Litigation Panel (JPML) established a consolidated pretrial procedure for these cases as part of the AT&T Data Breach MDL earlier this month and centralized the litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas under the presiding of Judge Ada E. Brown.
As part of the coordinated management of the litigation, Judge Brown is expected to establish a coordinated discovery schedule to reveal how customer information was leaked, what steps were taken to prevent the leak, and how long AT&T knew about the problem.
If the parties fail to negotiate damages for individual customers in the AT&T data breach lawsuits, the court is likely to select a small number of representative cases as early “bellwether” trials, which typically help the parties gauge how jurors will respond to certain evidence or testimony that may be repeated throughout the case.