Mall Smoothie Does Not Bind Teenager To Mom’s Arbitration Agreement With Credit Card
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A new Seventh Circuit case answers the age-old question: if a fourteen-year-old swipes her mom’s credit card to complete a smoothie purchase at the mall, is she bound to the credit card agreement?
The case, A.D. v. Credit One Bank, N.A., __ F.3d __, 2018 WL 1414907 (Mar. 22. 2018), addressed whether the lead plaintiff in a putative TCPA class action was bound to an arbitration agreement. The lead plaintiff was a teenager when the case was filed, and she alleged that the defendant bank called her cell phone multiple times to collect on her mother’s credit card debt. (A practice which is precluded by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).) During the course of discovery, the defendant bank realized that it had linked the teenager’s cell phone number to the mother’s credit card account when the mother used the teen’s cell phone to call the defendant. It also discovered that the teenager had completed a few smoothie purchases at the mall using her mother’s credit card. The defendant bank then made a motion to compel arbitration (and to deny class certification) based on the arbitration agreement in the mother’s cardholder agreement. The district court granted the motion, but the Seventh Circuit reversed.
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