The plaintiff for the case, Patrick Hendricks, claims that the "phantom data" over-charges were also found by an independent consulting company, which the complaint says "purchased an iPhone from an AT&T store, immediately disabled all push notifications and location services, confirmed that no email account was configured on the phone, closed all applications, and let the phone sit untouched for ten days."

Hendricks' complaint states that the consulting firm found that nearly 2.3 megabytes of data were charged against the new account for that 10 day period. The suit says that this is "like a rigged gas pump charging you when you never even pulled your car into the station." The complaint says that a 2 month study conducted by the consulting firm showed that AT&T typically over charged for data by 7 to 14 percent, and sometimes as much as by 300 percent. The study also claims that the actual data sessions are not posted in a timely manner, often leading to data use near the end of a billing cycle being applied to the next month.