A man has filed a lawsuit alleging Sears recorded phone calls without consent.

Plaintiff Gordon Siu has filed a class action lawsuit alleging Sears violated the California Consumer Privacy Act when the company recorded a phone call in early November 2017.

Siu alleges he didn’t know the company was recording phone calls without consent until he had already spoken on the phone at length with a Sears representative. He says the phone call was initiated by the Sears representative, who called Siu on his cell phone in response to a letter Siu had sent to Sears regarding unwanted emails.

Sears allegedly called Siu to confirm they had received his letter requesting that he be unsubscribed from all promotional emails. During the conversation, the Sears representative asked Siu for his email address, even though he had provided it in the letter about which Sears was calling.

Siu alleges that only after they had spoken at length did the Sears representative inform him the call was being recorded.

Sears Recording Phone Calls Without Consent

Siu indicates in his call recording lawsuit that at no time did he “give consent for the telephone call to be monitored, recorded and/or eavesdropped upon.”

Siu alleges that Sears had a policy of secretly recording phone calls without consent or of monitoring phone conversations with consumers without the permission of the person on the other end of the line, in violation of California law.

In addition, Sears’ website allegedly purports to bind visitors to contracts simply by visiting the websites. The contract allegedly contains a “gag order” that prohibits visitors from making statements about Sears or its employees or agents and their goods or services.

Siu is a member of the Sears Shop Your Way program and has visited the company’s websites. According to Siu’s lawsuit, Sears allegedly has threatened to enforce its gag order provisions against Siu.

Siu’s call recording lawsuit seeks to establish two Classes defined as:

Cellular Class: “All persons in California who answered a call from Sears on their regular cellular telephone during the year ending on the date of the filing of the original Complaint of this action.”

Website Class: “All persons in California who were a member of Defendant’s Shop Your Way program, or made a purchase on one or more of Defendant’s Websites, within one year before the filing of the original Complaint in this action.”

He says class action status is appropriate because Class Members can be identified through Sears’ records, call records and databases of cell phone numbers. He says issues are common among all of the Class Members, including whether or not Sears has a policy of recording outbound calls without warning at the outset of the call that it might be recorded.

The Recording Phone Calls Without Consent Lawsuit is Siu v. Sears Holdings Management Corporation, et al., Case No 3:18-cv-01980-BEN-KSC in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.