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Cingular Class Action Lawsuit

IF YOU HAVE BEEN A CELL PHONE CUSTOMER, YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR A SETTLEMENT CHECK:
CONTACT CLASS-ACTION LAW FIRMS FOR INFORMATION

Information about the Cingular Lawsuit:
The class-action lawsuit has been filed against the Cingular Wireless Company, a United States mobile phone provider and AT&T Incorporated, as well as AT&T Wireless Services, a mobile phone company that Cingular Wireless purchased in a $42 Billion transaction in late 2004.

Before the acquisition and merger, AT&T Wireless Incorporated was the 2nd largest vendor for cell phone communication services in America based on dollar revenue. AT&T Wireless had over twenty million paid customers as of December 30 2003, and had reported over sixteen billion dollars in revenues for the fiscal year 2003.

Cingular Rebate Check

You may be eligible for a settlement Check. To determine if you are eligible for a rebate or lawsuit settlement, be sure and contact a class-action lawfirm. You may have to fill out a short information form, and then you will be contacted regarding your setlement check or Cingular rebate check. Some consumer lawsuit settlements might include a free iphone or other financial compensation

What is the Cingular Class Action Lawsuit About?

• Before the merger of ATT and Cingular Wireless, Cingular promised that theAT&T Wireless customers would "continue to utilize the benefits of their existing equipment, phones, rate plans and features, without any service interruptions" and "it is only going to get better as we go forward!" Cingular's head sales & marketing executive said, 'The most tangible example of how Cingular wireless company is 'Raising the Bars' is the newly constructed and combined cellular network -- the biggest digital voice and data network in the United States of America."
• After the merger took place, Cingular created a deliberate scheme to take apart the AT&T Wireless network and infrastructure in order to reduce the quality of the service provided to AT&T Wireless customers and force them to switch over to the Cingular Mobile network. Cingular Company basically stopped servicing & maintaining the AT&T Wireless network facilities and cell phone towers, as was noted in trade publications, television, and talk show radio.
• AT&T Wireless customers have continued to complain of numerous dropped calls, and poor or no reception in many areas of the country.
• Unhappy AT&T Cellular consumers were given the option to "make an upgrade" to Cingular wireless Services by (1) paying an eighteen dollar "transfer fee" or " contract upgrade fee" paid to Cingular, (2) buying new cell phones from the Cingular vendor, (3) start brand-new service contracts with Cingular Wireless that are usually a worse price or less free minutes compared to the customer's existing contract with AT&T Wireless, and (4) charging the consumer an additional eighteen dollar fee for the new SIM chip that is required to make the new cell phones work.
• The old AT&T customer who do not want to purchase an "upgrade" offer are left holding the bag- given the choice of finishing their old contract with AT&T and have to live with the degraded or non-existent cell phone services, or by paying an early-termination contract fee of $175.00 to cancel the service before the end of the twelve or twenty-four month contract.

The class action lawsuit files also states that Cingular Wireless Services has engaged in false advertising, and breached the contracts with AT&T customers, and violated the consumer protection laws of each of the fifty states of America.

Why has this Class-Action been filed? The reason this class action has been filed is to get Cingular Wireless to stop from continuing its bad practices to the consumer; make Cingular Company to repay with interest, the amount of money that the consumer has had to pay because of Cingular's gross misconduct, including the "early termination fee," any "upgrade" or "transfer" fee, and punitive damages; and require Cingular Wireless to pay for "corrective advertising."

When was the Cingular Lawsuit filed? The class-action lawsuit was filed on July 6th, 2006 , in United States District Court located in Seattle, WA.

Are all consumers included in the class-action lawsuit? The lawsuit is a nation-wide class action suit that covers all AT&T Wireless consumers who were customers as of October 26, 2004.

Who has filed this class action lawsuit? The class-action is based on many investigations of thousands of complaints received by the non-profit organization Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR), which is a Calif located crusader for consumer protection rights. The FTCR has submitted several lawsuits against a few Mobile Phone companies for billing errors and abuse, bad service, charging "Early termination fees", and for the practice of disabling or "locking" cell phone equipment so that an owner cannot use the existing cell phone when they move to a new cell service provider. For additional information, please also visit Tobacco Lawsuit.

What is the next step for the consumer? What will probably happen is that the cell phone company will seek to get the case dismissed because of the grounds that the consumers have previously signed an "arbitration agreement" that limits to sue in a court of law. In this particular case, lawyers for the plaintiffs say that these arbitration agreements are unfair and cannot be enforced by the defendants.

Cingular Wireless Lawsuit Filed

There is a new effort to protect cell phone consumers against getting taken advantage of and anti- competitive tactics, a west coast consumer advocacy organization says that America's largest cell phone providers alleging that in the past the companies secretly inserted a software "lock" the cell phones they sold to keep the user from being able to use the phone on another mobile company's system.

Detailed in the lawsuit, which was filed in L. A. Superior Court under California's new powerful consumer protection laws, mobile phones phones sold by Cingular, AT&T , and T-Mobile, were originally designed by the manufacturer to enable the end users to change out a microchip inside their cellphone that ID's them as a client of one of the cell phone providers. Consumers who wanted to go to another mobile services company and keep the same cell phone number would also want to keep their phones under this advanced technology. The class action lawsuit alleges that the three mobile carrier companies have prevented this open access and deny the customer a fair market choice.

Because of this, a consumer of one cell phone company has to buy a new cell phone and basically throw away an otherwise perfectly good cell phone just to change companies. The result is that most customers are forced to stick it out with a mobile phone company whose service they dislike. Competition is also limited, and usable phones clog our landfills with toxins.

FTCR's case against Cingular Wireless focuses centers on Cingular's inability to provide reasonable coverage for its clients, and for misleading ads about the quality of its mobile phone calling service. The Cingular lawsuit has been augmented with two other related class actions in San Diego, California Superior Court.

• Do Cell Phones Cause Cancer?

Recently it has been stated that over 93 million individuals used Mobile Phones in the United States of America. This number keeps increasing, as more and more consumers "cut the cord" and go mobile.

The world now has over 1 Billion Cell Phone users, and that number continues to grow. Questions in the medical and scientific community have not yet been answered about the safety of cell phones and other mobile devices. It has been alleged that widespread use of cellular technologies can be detrimental to your health, including the possibility for causing brain cancer.

The question: "Can cell Phones Cause Cancer?" first came before public scrutiny in early 1993 on a TV talk show where a man living in Florida announced that his wife's terminal brain tumor was caused by Radio Frequency Emissions or other radiation from her mobile phone.

The original legal case was dismissed in late 1995 because the plaintiff was ubable to bring forth enough scientific and medical evidence to prove the case, but the question of "Do Mobile Phones Cause Brain Tumors?" had already received large public attention. In the years to come, many more allegations and cell phone lawsuits would try to decide if consumers were injured as a result of chronic and repeated RF radiation.

Cell Phones and mobile devices operate with RF (Radio Frequencies); it is a form of electro-magnetic energy located on the electromagnetic spectrum somewhere between FM Stereo frequencies and the frequencies used in microwave ovens, radar systems and weather satellites.
The amount of radio frequency energy a human is exposed to by using a mobile phone depends on a number of factors:

• The physical distance the user or equipment is from the base station
• The length of use (amount of calls) frequency of mobile phone use
• The model & age of the cell equipment (older mobile devices can put out higher exposure than newer, digital ones).

A number of government and scientific groups such as the Federal Communications Commission, have established limits for exposure to RF fields for humans. Regardless of these limits, many individuals claim that repeated radio frequency energy exposure from cell phones, even at low energy levels can cause brain tumors and brain cancer.

The brain cancer patients didn't report more cell phone use than the subjects who were free of brain cancer. In fact, for reasons that remain unclear, most of the studies showed a tendency toward lower risk of brain cancer among cellular phone users.When different types of brain cancer were considered, none were consistently associated with cell phone use.When specific locations of tumors within the brain were considered, no associations with cell phone use were found. None of the studies showed a clear link between the side of the head on which the brain cancer occurred and the side on which the cellular phone was used.Many animal experiments have also been conducted and have yielded conflicting results. A few of these studies have suggested that low levels of RF could accelerate the development of cancer in laboratory rats.
However, many of the studies that showed increased tumor development used rats that had been genetically engineered to be predisposed to develop cancer in the absence of RF exposure. Other studies exposed the animals to RF for up to 22 hours per day.

According to the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), a combination of laboratory studies and studies of people actually using cell phones would provide some of the necessary data.
Lifetime animal exposure studies could be completed in a few years, but very large numbers of animals would be needed to provide reliable proof of a cancer-promoting effect, if one exists.

Studies on humans can provide information that is directly applicable to the human population. But since it can take many years after exposure to a cancer-causing agent for tumors to develop, 10 or more years of follow-up could be necessary in order to achieve reliable results.

Although there is no proof that there are risks, if you are concerned about it, then the best precaution you can take to reduce your exposure to RF energy would be to reduce the amount of time spent on your phone. If you must have extended conversations on your cell phone every day, place more distance between your body and your phone. For example, you could use a headset and carry the phone away from your body.

• TO FILE A CLAIM, CONTACT ONE OF THE LAW FIRMS LISTED

Cingular Lawsuit
Information Center

You may be eligible for a settlement. Contact any of the law firms listed here to help you file a claim. We provide information on the following Cingular Class Action :

• Cingular Lawsuit Status
• Cingular Class Action Lawsuit
• Rebate Check Status
• Cingular Refunds
• AT&T Wireless Lawsuit
• Do Cell Phones Cause Cancer?