Cingular files Lawsuit against CAS Agency Inc
September 29th, 2006The Wall Street Journal reports today that Cingular Wireless filed suit against CAS Agency Inc. and one of its employees, Charles Kelly. The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Atlanta states that the company fraudulently accessed the call records of one of its customers, CNET reporter Dawn Kawamoto.
Cingular Wireless states that CAS had contacted customer service agents posing as customers or as employees of the carrier in order to grant them access to customer’s accounts. Tactics as such are known commonly as social engineering.
Cingular is the second cellphone operator to take legal action against small firms that participated in the H-P investigation. Yesterday, Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC, filed a lawsuit in New Jersey federal court against 20 unnamed individuals who it says obtained its customers’ cellphone records as part of the H-P probe.
Prior to the unfolding of the H-P scandal, cellphone operators were already taking aggressive action against companies that gain access to their customers’ phone records through deceit or fraud — a practice known as “pre-texting.”
