Don’t you hate it when you receive unsolicited text messages from companies or people advertising their products and services? If you do, you might recall that a couple of years ago Yahoo got into trouble when they started sending unsolicited text messages to Sprint customers, and now it looks like their troubles just got bigger.
US District Court Judge Manish Shah has ordered Yahoo to face a class-action lawsuit over the incident that took place back in 2013 which violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The judge had found that because of the number of lawsuits with similar claims, users could sue as a group if they wanted.
Prior to this, Yahoo had argued that a class-action lawsuit could result in damages that are disproportionate to the alleged harm, but obviously the judge thought otherwise. For those who are unfamiliar with the case, basically what happened is that Yahoo sent these customers “Welcome” messages when other users sent them messages through Yahoo Messenger.
Presumably this was done in hopes that the user receiving the message would then go and download Yahoo Messenger and use it, but the end result was that many users felt that these messages amounted to unwanted advertising, hence the initial lawsuit. If found guilty, Yahoo could be looking at damages of up to $1,500 per message, with more than 500,000 users potentially being part of the class, that would be a very expensive lawsuit for Yahoo.