T-Mobile faces a lawsuit after an employee sent himself nude photos he found on a customer's phone

• T-Mobile is facing another lawsuit over allegations that it has failed to protect customer data.
• A member of staff is accused of sending nudes found on a customers phone to his Snapchat account.

T-Mobile is facing legal action for failing to protect a customer's private data after one of their employees found and stole nude photos from her iPhone when she came to upgrade an old device, CNBC reported.

The incident occurred last October at a T-Mobile store in the Columbia Center Mall in southern Washington.

The victim's identity is anonymous in the complaint. She states in the lawsuit that she had gone to the store to upgrade her iPhone and have data from the old device wiped. But on checking her Snapchat account that evening, she realized that nude photos and a video of her and her partner having sex had been sent to an unknown account without her consent.

Police traced the account to the employee at the store who had handled her phone earlier that day.

T-Mobile have said that the man was not employed by them, but was a third-party retailer employee.

But the lawsuit states that as she tried to investigate what had happened and tried to get her phone back, T-Mobile denied that any trade-ins had taken place that day and told her she would need to pay to get the old device back.

The employee pled guilty last month to charges of first-degree computer trespass and disclosing intimate images.

But now T-Mobile is also being sued by the victim for "turning a blind eye" to employees that exploit their access to customer's sensitive data and failing to train them adequately.

"T-Mobile has failed to implement any common-sense security hardware or software to protect consumers from their data and privacy being exploited during ordinary transactions at the T-Mobile store," the lawsuit alleges, per CNBC.

The story echoes similar cases brought against T-Mobile, in which employees have downloaded intimate content from customers who had brought in old phones in for an upgrade, as the New York Post has reported.

"Today we sued T-Mobile for its pattern and practice of incentivizing trade-ins knowing some of their pervs will steal customers' nudes and sex vids. The jig is up," tweeted Carrie Goldberg, one of the lawyers who filed the lawsuit.

T-Mobile has not indicated how it plans to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future at their stores.

"This was an employee of a third-party authorized retailer who they terminated," a T-mobile spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider.

"While we are unable to comment on the specifics of this pending case, we want to underscore that we take customer protection and issues like this very seriously. Unfortunately, these types of incidents are an industry problem. That is why we have policies and procedures in place to protect customer information and expect them to be followed," they added.