Yahoo hasn’t always been in the black, as far as their quarterly earnings go. Only recently, did they start to make a comeback and bring in new users for their services. As well as buying one of the more popular social media platforms in Tumblr. Yahoo had been sending unwanted text messages to non-Yahoo customers before, these messages were sent when someone messaged them on Yahoo Messenger, these were Welcome messages. The lawsuit came up after a resident in Illinois stated that she received this unwanted message after being sent a spam text message from a financial service. In 2013, Yahoo texted at least 500,000 Sprint customers, which is why the internet company is now facing a class action lawsuit. A federal judge in Chicago is allowing the suit to continue. After having rejected Yahoo’s arguments against the class action lawsuit. The company could be looking at up to $1,500 in damages for each message sent in 2013 to non-Yahoo customers. So in total, Yahoo could be on the hook for around $750 million in damages.
Yahoo Messenger used to be one of the company’s most popular services. And this Welcome message was a good way to get users to use the service, especially as they were losing customers to competitors. Text messages like this have been a thorn in the back of many customers. Back in 2013, T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint all made an agreement with 45 of the 50 US states to discontinue charging customers for premium SMS messages that they receive. Verizon wasn’t part of this settlement, but did also agree to stop billing customers for these premium SMS messages.
Lately, Yahoo has been in the news quite a bit. Between looking to sell their internet business, selling off land they own and now this class action lawsuit. It’s still not looking good for the once thriving company. Yahoo will likely look to settle this class action lawsuit, but it will likely be months before the lawsuit is finalized. And those that are part of the class action lawsuit likely won’t see much in terms of compensation from these unwanted text messages sent back in 2013. As is typical with class action lawsuits, most times.