This recent case out of the Central District of California, Perez v. DirecTV Group Holdings, LLC, Case No. 8:16-cv-1440-JLS-DFMx, has some interesting allegations. The plaintiff claims that DirecTV contacted her, unsolicited, at her place of business and sold her a promotional deal there for satellite cable. After the plaintiff agreed to the deal, DirecTV installed the equipment that same day and then asked the plaintiff to sign an Equipment Lease Agreement (ELA). The ELA was entirely in English, even though all communications up to that point had taken place in Spanish (and even though DirecTV apparently had a Spanish-language version of the ELA). The plaintiff signed the ELA, even though she couldn’t understand it and it wasn’t translated for her, and gave it to the DirecTV representative. She was not given a copy to keep for herself.

Later, after selling her the satellite cable, DirecTV then contacted the plaintiff to say that she didn’t have permission to display the cable, since she was displaying it in a business. It demanded settlement of the purported illegal reception and display. The reception and display DirecTV complained about was the same equipment that DirecTV had just installed. DirecTV demanded $5,000 from the plaintiff to settle the claim. The plaintiff brought this class action, alleging that this was part of a scheme DirecTV had to target selling its services to small business owners (especially minority business owners) and then immediately turn around and accuse those small business owners of having purchased the wrong type of DirecTV for their businesses.

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