This isn't your typical complaint against a phone company.
One dad is saying that T-Mobile deleted voicemails off of his phone left by his daughter before she died, ABC News reports. Faron Butler, whose daughter was 14 when she died of cancer, said the company was offering him a free trial of its voice-to-text service when it deleted the voicemails. T-Mobile told Butler that there's no way to retrieve the lost messages.
"T-Mobile deeply regrets the sorrow the Butler family is experiencing,” said as part of an e-mail statement to KPIC.com, an Oregon based local news outlet.
The deleted messages raise questions about the ability of a company to recover a digital recording made on one of its devices. Butler hired an attorney to file a lawsuit on his behalf in aim to get the recordings from T-Mobile.
"Just like with your computer, it's really difficult to truly erase a whole lot of digital anything," Chris Crew, Butler's lawyer told KPIC. "It's part of an emerging field of law surrounding how much the digital world has become part of our daily lives."
This is just the latest story in a slew of bad news to hit T-Mobile. The company announced Friday that it is laying off 1,900 employees, according to CNNMoney. While the company is still turning a profit, it’s losing customers and investing billions of dollars in an effort to keep up with its rivals.
Butler's story is tragic, but it's not the most extreme scandal related to voicemails from a deceased teenage girl. When the Guardian reported in July that journalists from the News of the World tabloid hacked into the voicemails of a murdered British schoolgirl, it ignited a firestorm that ultimately resulted in the paper being shut down.
In another unfortunate voicemail incident, an accounting firm told 500 staffers to dial-in to a pre-recorded message only to discover that they were at risk of being laid off, according to the Telegraph.