Centurylink is a giant, scammy telco notorious for larding its
customers’ bills with fraudulent charges, and instructing its customer
service reps to do everything possible not to waive those charges; they
also open fake accounts in their customers’ names, a la Wells Fargo, and
then rack up charges against them.
Naturally, they’re getting sued; their customers have banded together in
a class action suit. Centurylink has a great defense for this: it
claims that these poor saps don’t actually do business with Centurylink,
they do business with a bunch of shell company subsidiaries that no one
has ever heard of. According to Centurylink, it has zero customers.
Moreover, Centurylink says that its shell companies have already made
all the angry people it stole from agree to “broad, all-compassing
arbitration, and class-action waiver clauses in their service
contracts,” so they can’t sue Centurylink or its subsidiaries.
It gets better! Centurylink claims that this binding arbitration and
class-action waiver also extends to the accounts that it fraudulently
opened in its customers’ names – that when it forged their consent to
open new accounts, it also forged their consent not to sue them over it,
and that this is somehow binding (Wells Fargo also took this position).
Centurylink’s victims say it’s all bullshit. They didn’t agree to
binding arbitration, they didn’t do business with Centurylink’s
disposable shell-companies, and forging their signature on a contract
does not bind them to the contract’s terms.
