Cingular Wireless Wins Out against Phone-Record “Burglars”

Cingular Wireless LLC has won $1.1 million in damages in a lawsuit against a data broker it alleged had unlawfully accessed and used some of its customer records.

Atlanta-based Cingular brought the suit in December against 1st Source Information Specialists Inc. The wireless company had already been granted a permanent injunction against the data broker.

Last December Cingular filed civil suit against 1st Source and also against Data Find Solutions. According to that filing, Data Solutions had once owned, and 1st Source currently operated, several Web sites that advertise the sale of phone records, including www.locatecell.com and www.celltolls.com. Cingular alleged that the companies had obtained records for Cingular phone customers through fraudulent means, for example by posing as customers seeking information about their own accounts.

Cingular was granted its injunction against the pair in January, and the Federal Communications Commission launched a probe of online data brokers selling private wireless and wireline phone records.

Cingular trumpeted Friday’s judgment against 1st Source as a victory in defense of customer privacy. “This victory underscores the fact that Cingular will not tolerate data burglars,” said Joaquin Carbonell, executive vice president and general counsel for the company, in a release. “We are fighting to protect customer privacy on other fronts as well, including filing new lawsuits against telemarketers and spammers.”

The company said it currently is pursuing seven lawsuits against more than 30 corporate and individual defendants for alleged cellphone-record theft and has obtained permanent injunctions against most of them.

Cingular said it has also filed new lawsuits to protect customers from unsolicited and illegal telemarketing wireless calls and text messages. One of these is against the operators of two time-share sites, whom Cingular says sent “unauthorized, deceptive and unsolicited” text messages to Cingular customers in October. A second suit levels the same charges against Gary Bullard of Miramar FL for sending text messages advertising “free” vacations.

In both cases, the phone carrier charges that the defendants violated federal and state statutes by camouflaging their identities to get around Cingular’s spam message filters.