AT&T sues data brokers selling phone call records

AT&T has filed a lawsuit against 25 unnamed data brokers for using "pretexting" to obtain customer call data records. These data brokers would pose as the legitimate customers in order to obtain billing records for third parties for a fee. Data brokers selling this data over the Internet got some negative public attention last summer and in January of this year, but Congress has not made pretexting illegal for phone records the way it is for financial records. It came out in June of this year that law enforcement and federal agencies were active customers of these data brokers, using them to obtain data without having to go through the process of getting warrants.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center already filed an FTC complaint against one data broker, Bestpeoplesearch.com.