A former Oregon reseller of Paging Network Inc. is suing the Oregon branch of the nation’s largest paging carrier, and is encouraging others to join it in a possible future class-action lawsuit against the company’s main office.
Plans call for the lawsuit, filed last August by Your Phone Company Inc. of Portland against PageNet of Oregon Inc., is scheduled to go to trial May 6, according to court documents obtained by RCR.
Officials at PageNet would not comment on the lawsuit or its charges.
In the suit, YPC claims that on Sept. 12, 1995, PageNet terminated a reseller agreement that began in June 1993, for not paying charges that YPC called “excessive and unjustified.” The company said that it regularly paid all reseller charges until PageNet began overcharging the company by continuing to charge for numbers that the phone company had deactivated months prior.
YPC said that when it complained about these actions and refused to pay the overcharges, PageNet terminated the reseller agreement, charging YPC with being in default. The company further claims that PageNet then called its customers telling them that YPC would no longer provide paging services and then illegally disclosed its customer list to its competitors. As such, YPC is suing under the Oregon Trade Secrets Act.
The company claims the 350 customers on that list are valued at $500 each and is asking for three times that total amount in damages, as well as attorney fees and costs and other relief the court deems appropriate.
Jim Keeling, YPC’s owner, said three other Oregon resellers are in the process of filing their own lawsuits in Oregon state court and that they have organized with resellers in Washington, California, Texas and New York to file a class-action suit against the national company.
They charge that PageNet has systematically overcharged its resellers in an attempt to take their customers.
“We found that the way PageNet went into business of predatory pricing and overcharging resellers themselves is not just an isolated incident,” Keeling said.
“We are interested in other resellers that have had similar problems and we are going to follow with a class-action lawsuit.”
