DirecTV beats $4B lawsuit that alleged it tricked customers into paying more

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

AT&T-owned DirecTV has defeated the bulk of a $4 billion lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission, which wasn't able to convince a judge that DirecTV ads deceived customers about the price of service.

The FTC sued DirecTV in March 2015, alleging that the nation's largest satellite TV provider used deceptive advertising to get consumers to agree to price increases of up to $45 per month and early cancellation fees of up to $480. The FTC was seeking refunds for affected consumers.

But a judge's ruling on Thursday gutted the FTC's case against DirecTV, which has been an AT&T subsidiary since July 2015. "The FTC's ambition in attempting to show that over 40,000 advertisements were likely to deceive substantially exceeded the strength of its evidence," wrote Judge Haywood Gilliam, Jr. of US District Court for the Northern District of California. "This case did not involve the type of strong proof the Court would expect to see in a case seeking nearly $4 billion in restitution, based on a claim that all of DirecTV's 33 million customers between 2007 and 2015 were necessarily deceived."

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