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While supposedly transferring data to a customer’s new iPhone one day, an employee at a Kendall T-Mobile store decided to go on a little fishing expedition through her photos and videos. When he found some that piqued his interest – nudes and videos of the woman having sex – he took the liberty of sending them to himself and then forwarded them to a few friends.
He might have gotten away with the extremely creepy move, except that he left all of the outgoing messages on the phone. The customer got home and saw that her most private images had been sent to a number she didn’t recognize. Startled, she called it and got the T-Mobile guy’s voicemail.
Two years later, the customer is suing the local company that operates the T-Mobile-authorized store at 10780 SW 72nd Ave. In a complaint filed last month in Miami-Dade civil court, the woman identified only as Jane Doe accuses the company, Troc, LLC., of negligence, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other things.
“These things shouldn’t happen,” her attorney, Manuel Fente, tells New Times.
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Regrettably, these things do happen. In fact, an employee at a Pinellas Park T-Mobile store was arrested in May after sending himself a customer’s sexually explicit video. Roberto Sanchez-Ramos, age 25, is charged with offenses against computer users and scheme to defraud.
Similar charges were filed against two Tampa-area Verizon employees caught pulling the same stunt in 2015. The pair, then-28-year-old Gregory Lampbert and 27-year-old Joshua Stuart, ultimately pleaded no contest to the felony charge of committing an offense against computer users. Each man was sentenced to 30 days of weekend work release and three years of probation.
In the Kendall case, no arrests appear to have been made.
An attorney for Troc, LLC., Margaret Mevers, could not immediately be reached Thursday. In court filings, she has argued that the store cannot be held accountable for its employee’s actions, which she says were personal and unforeseeable. She has also argued that the name of the woman should be revealed because nothing in Florida law authorizes her to remain anonymous.
Fente says he plans to fight that request. He says his client has been distressed by the experience and worries about where her photos and videos may have ended up.
“Obviously, once it gets onto someone’s cell phone,” he says, “who knows where it goes from there.”
