Birmingham Vivint Security Lawyers

How Did the Vivint Security Theft Happen?

To be eligible to finance a smart home security system from Vivint, a customer must have a minimum credit score. When a potential customer failed to meet the minimum credit score, we believe Vivint employees and sales representatives, incentivized by sales commissions, submitted other people’s names to pass the credit check.

If the unsuspecting person passed the credit check, Vivint would include that person as an account holder on the contract. These contracts can be for five or more years and exceed $4,000. When Vivint’s system installers went to install the systems for these fraudulent contracts, they were required to acquire the accountholder’s signatures. We believe the Vivint installers were either forging the signatures themselves or allowing others to do so. Since they are paid per installation, the installers would have lost money if they canceled the contracts instead.

Who Is Responsible for Vivint Security Negligence?

We believe that Vivint’s corporate executives and managers failed to implement common sense safeguards to prevent its salespeople and installers from committing this identity theft and forgery. For example, this scheme would not have been possible if Vivint had a policy in place that required its installers to look at and document the photo ID of every person that signs a contract for a new Vivint account. However, Vivint did not have this policy in place.

Safeguards like these are not just common sense, federal law requires them. Under the “Red Flags Rule” in the Fair Credit Reporting Act, companies like Vivint “must develop and implement a written Identity Theft Prevention Program (Program) that is designed to detect, prevent, and mitigate identity theft in connection with the opening of a covered account.” The Federal Trade Commission is responsible for enforcing this rule.

In its most recent annual filing, Vivint reported that it had “received a civil investigative demand from the staff of the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) concerning potential violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”) and the “Red Flags Rule.”Our attorneys believe that Vivint’s corporate executives and managers knew that their employees were routinely creating fraudulent accounts using identity theft and forgery, yet chose to ignore it. As a result, thousands of innocent people have been harassed by debt collectors and their credit scores have suffered. This fraudulent debt is due solely to Vivint’s failure to enact proper security measures for preventing identity theft and forgery.

‍