As fallout grows from a hack attack against
infidelity website Ashley Madison, Missouri lawyers have filed a class-action
lawsuit in United States district court seeking more than $5 million in
damages.
And a
prominent Toronto law firm is looking for potential plaintiffs to start a
class-action suit for Canadian victims.
U.S.
lawyers filed a statement of claim late last month on behalf of an unnamed
female plaintiff from Maryland Heights, Mo., who said she’d ponied up $19 so
Ashley Madison would purge her personal information from its website in a
process called a “paid-delete.”
It’s
alleged Toronto-based parent company Avid Life Media “failed to adequately
analyze its computer systems for vulnerabilities that could expose cardholder data.”
“(Avid
Life) maintains or maintained information ... regarding nearly 37-million
subscribers, and defendant’s security failures affected the credit and debit
cards of hundreds of thousands if not millions of customers.”
The class action sheds light on money
flows from the CWM fund, which promised investors high rates of return through
interest from banks in the Cayman Islands.
The fund was run by Capital World
Markets, which was formed two years ago and won the right to become Chelsea
football club’s ‘online forex trading partner’ at the start of the year. The
Premier League champions have since dropped their association with the firm.
Earlier this year City of London police arrested 13 people in
a raid on the firm’s headquarters in Heron Tower at part of its investigation
into alleged fraud.
Class
Action Lawsuits Filed Against J. Crew and Build-A-Bear on Behalf of Blind
Customers Nationwide
J.Crew Group, Inc., a national clothing retailer, and
Build-A-Bear Workshop, Inc., a retailer of children's stuffed animals, were
sued in separate class action lawsuits last week in the Southern District of New York (Case No. 15-cv-06337) and the District of Colorado, (Case No. 15-cv-01724), respectively, alleging the
companies discriminate against their blind customers.
The lawsuits, brought by the Martinez Law Group, P.C., on behalf
of the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition, a nonprofit disability rights
advocacy organization, the National Federation of the Blind, the nation's
leading advocate for the rights of the blind, and seven individual named
Plaintiffs who reside in New York, Colorado, Texas, and California, allege violations of Title III of the Americans with
Disabilities Act (ADA) as well as various state laws, based on the merchants'
failure to provide accessible point-of-sale devices (POS Devices) that enable
blind customers to securely enter their private PIN codes when making a
purchase.
Both merchants have been sued repeatedly by blind customers over
the last two years for their failure to provide accessible POS Devices. Despite
numerous prior lawsuits, the merchants continued, for years, to delay making
the necessary changes required to make their POS Devices accessible to the
blind. As alleged in each Complaint, the unnecessary and avoidable delay by
both merchants in complying with the law is surprising given that the retailers
operate extensively in California, which has since 2010 required that every merchant
operating in California provide tactile keypads at every POS terminal.
Cleveland
attorney wins class action settlement for Los Angeles water and power customers
Customers
of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will be refunded $36 million
as part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit against the utility, stemming
from the same billing system problems that plagued the Cleveland water department for years.
The settlement, which was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on
Monday, requires the utility to invest $20 million in a comprehensive overhaul
of its billing system and conduct an audit of all 1.6 million customers
accounts. The city also agreed to hire an independent monitor to ensure
compliance.
Cleveland attorney Jack Landskroner filed the suit in April on
behalf of ratepayers in Los Angeles, based in part on information he had
gathered while investigating Cleveland's billing problems.
Tesco
moves to toss U.S. securities case – but real action is in U.K
The British grocery giant Tesco moved Monday night to dismiss a securities class action in Manhattan federal district
court that alleges the company’s coverup of an accounting scheme eventually
resulted in a 15 percent plummet in the price of Tesco’s American Depository
Receipts. Tesco’s lawyers at Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz argue that because Tesco ADRs do not trade on a U.S.
stock exchange – they are only sold over the counter – investors cannot sue in
federal court under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Morrison v.
National Australia Bank.
According to Wachtell, this issue has already been decided, in an
early post-Morrison ruling that tossed a class action against Societe Generale.
That decision briefly noted that because SocGen ADRs traded only in the
relatively informal over-the-counter market, those transactions are “primarily
foreign.” Tesco contends that the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed
in its 2014 decision in Parkcentral
Global Hub v. Porsche that investors in securities not traded on U.S. exchanges cannot
sue issuers under federal law.
Amazon
Softens Blow Of Times Article, But It’s Too Soon To Celebrate, Say Attorneys
In recent days, Amazon has worked to soften the blow
of a blistering piece about its culture in Sunday’s New York Times. In the
article’s immediate aftermath, Jeff Bezos wrote a memo to employees, saying the account “doesn’t describe the Amazon I
know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day.” He further pointed
employees to a newer piece by current Amazon engineer Nick Ciubotariu that
praises the company’s workplace environment.
The moves helped push the story
in a positive direction for the company, as did the Times’s own public
editor’s assessment of the story, which, she wrote yesterday, should have provided more
balance and context. (The Times’s executive editor, Dean Banquet, later let her
know that he disagreed entirely with her assessment.)
Still, employment attorneys
suggest it may be a little soon for Amazon to break out the bubbly. They
think there could well be a class-action lawsuit in the many anecdotes
cited by the Times of employees who were treated poorly —
particularly those who appear to have they lost their jobs owing to health
issues and other demands outside of Amazon.
Banks
face further forex pain as door opens for group legal action
Big banks implicated in the foreign exchange rate rigging
scandal could face further legal action after new laws surrounding group legal
action come into effect in the UK this autumn.
Earlier this week nine banks, including Barclays, RBS and HSBC, reached a
settlement with complainants in an American class action lawsuit, agreeing to pay out a total of more than $2 billion (£1.28 billion).
Currently the UK has no equivalent of the American class
action lawsuit, making it difficult for individuals, smaller companies and
groups to take legal action for alleged breaches of competition law.
Target
to pay Visa $67M in settlement over data breach
A settlement between Target Corp. and Visa Inc. moves the retailer
a step closer to resolving most of the financial claims against it from the
2013 data breach.
However, an attorney
representing banks and other card issuers and a trade group representing credit
unions pressed Target for more.
Under the settlement
announced Tuesday, Minneapolis-based Target will pay up to $67 million to cover
the costs that Visa Inc. and issuers of Visa cards incurred when cyberthieves
broke into Target’s data system. The amount is more than three times larger
than a $19 million settlement between Target and MasterCard Inc. that fell
apart in May when banks and other issuers rejected the amount as too low.
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