(NEW YORK) — Disgraced crypto executive Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty to federal criminal charges in Manhattan on Tuesday and was tentatively scheduled to stand trial Oct. 2.
Bankman-Fried, instantly recognizable by his mop of unkempt hair, appeared before Judge Lewis Kaplan in a dark suit and tie. His mother sat behind him in the spectator benches.
The former CEO of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX did not speak during the hearing. His attorney, Mark Cohen, entered the not guilty plea on his behalf.
“He pleads not guilty to all counts,” Cohen said.
Bankman-Fried has been charged with eight counts of fraud and conspiracy. Federal prosecutors have alleged Bankman-Fried orchestrated one of the “biggest financial frauds in American history” by steering billions in FTX customer and investor money and funneling it to his privately controlled hedge fund Alameda Research.
Other funds were used to buy lavish real estate and to make tens of millions in political donations, court records said.
The number of victims of the FTX fraud could exceed 1 million, a prosecutor said during Tuesday’s hearing.
“FTX was the second-largest crypto exchange,” the prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, said.
Before his arrest last month, Bankman-Fried insisted in numerous interviews, including one with ABC News, that he did not know about any improper use of funds from customers of now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX.
Bankman-Fried has been free on bond and subject to electronic monitoring while living at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California. The judge added a condition of release that prevents Bankman-Fried from accessing or transferring assets from FTX or Alameda Research.
Reflecting the complexity of the case, federal prosecutors announced Tuesday they were bringing additional resources to bear in an attempt to track down stolen billions that disappeared from FTX.
Bankman-Fried was extradited from the Bahamas, where he lived in a multimillion-dollar mansion, on Dec. 21.
Two of his former colleagues, Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors
“We prepared certain quarterly balance sheets that concealed the extent of Alameda’s borrowing and the billions of dollars in loans that Alameda had made to FTX executives and to related parties. I also understood that FTX had not disclosed to FTX’s equity investors that Alameda could borrow a potentially unlimited amount from FTX, thereby putting customer assets at risk,” Ellison said during her closed-door plea hearing last month, according to a transcript obtained by ABC News.
Ellison, former CEO of Alameda and girlfriend of Bankman-Fried, pleaded guilty to seven counts. Wang, co-founder of FTX with Bankman-Fried, pleaded guilty to to four counts.
(NEW YORK) — The first Mega Millions game of the new year is among its largest, with an estimated $785 million jackpot ahead of Tuesday night’s drawing.
It’s the fourth-largest jackpot in the lottery game’s 20-plus-year history and the sixth-largest jackpot in U.S. history.
The estimated $785 million prize can be paid with annual checks over 29 years or in a lump cash sum for an estimated $395 million.
The Mega Millions jackpot has continued to balloon over the past two-and-a-half months, with 22 drawings since the jackpot was last won on Oct. 14.
“On only three previous occasions has the Mega Millions jackpot gone beyond $700 million, and all three times those rolls continued on past $1 billion,” Mega Millions said.
The most recent time was in July, when an anonymous ticket owner in Des Plaines, Illinois, won a historic $1.34 billion prize.
The Mega Millions jackpot is the largest since a single ticket in California won a historic $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot on Nov. 8. A winner has yet to be announced.
The odds of winning the Mega Millions’ top prize are 1 in 302.6 million.
Mega Millions is played in 45 states plus Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
(NEW YORK) — Nearly half of U.S. states raised their minimum wages at the outset of 2023, helping millions of workers contend with the nation’s ongoing bout of high inflation.
In all, 23 states raised their wage floors at the start of this year in keeping with inflation-adjusted increases or as part of scheduled hikes that take effect at the beginning of each calendar year.
The pay increases affect about 8.4 million workers, who will gain a combined $5 billion over the course of 2023, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found.
After the wave of wage hikes, Washington became the state with the highest minimum wage, offering workers $15.74 per hour. Meanwhile, workers in Massachusetts and the New York City area saw their minimum base pay rise to $15 per hour.
In California, the state with the most workers affected by a pay increase, more than 3 million employees will benefit, the Economic Policy Institute found. That group of workers makes up nearly 20% of the state’s workforce.
Thirteen states raised their minimum wage to adjust for inflation that reached a 40-year high in 2022, including blue states like Massachusetts and red states like Nebraska.
Overall, the states that raised the minimum wage in recent days include: Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and Washington.
In addition, 27 cities and counties raised their minimum wage at the outset of this year, stretching from San Diego, California, to Portland, Maine. The city with the highest minimum wage, SeaTac, Washington, raised its base pay to $19.06.
The latest round of pay increases, however, will not affect any of the 20 states concentrated in the South that lack a minimum wage or offer a minimum wage that does not exceed the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour.
The last federal minimum wage hike took place in 2009, when Congress raised the pay floor to its current level. When adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum wage last summer reached its lowest level since 1956, the Economic Policy Institute found.
The nationwide push for minimum wage hikes intensified in 2012, when fast food workers launched a campaign called Fight for $15, aiming to raise wages and unionize the fast food sector. The Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, one of the nation’s largest labor organizations, spent tens of millions of dollars in support of the effort.
(NEW YORK) — Disgraced crypto executive Sam Bankman-Fried is likely to plead not guilty to an eight-count fraud and conspiracy indictment when he appears in Manhattan federal court Tuesday, a person familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Federal prosecutors have alleged Bankman-Fried orchestrated one of the “biggest financial frauds in American history” by steering billions in FTX customer and investor money and funneling it to his privately controlled hedge fund Alameda Research. Other funds were used to buy lavish real estate and to make tens of millions in political donations, court records said.
Before his arrest last month, Bankman-Fried insisted in numerous interviews, including one with ABC News, that he did not know about any improper use of funds from customers of now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX.
Bankman-Fried has been free on bond and subject to electronic monitoring while living at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California.
Two of his former colleagues, Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
“We prepared certain quarterly balance sheets that concealed the extent of Alameda’s borrowing and the billions of dollars in loans that Alameda had made to FTX executives and to related parties. I also understood that FTX had not disclosed to FTX’s equity investors that Alameda could borrow a potentially unlimited amount from FTX, thereby putting customer assets at risk,” Ellison said during her closed-door plea hearing last month, according to a transcript obtained by ABC News.
Ellison, former chief of Alameda and an ex-girlfriend of Bankman-Fried, pleaded guilty to seven counts. Wang, cofounder of FTX with Bankman-Fried, pleaded guilty to to four counts.
(NEW YORK) — Apple marked a grim milestone this week, falling about $1 trillion below a peak reached in 2022.
The company’s shares rallied in recent days, but the massive loss in value reflects difficult economic times for companies across the tech industry and beyond.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq plummeted by about one-third in 2022 while the broader S&P 500 fell 19% over that period. Apple’s performance, meanwhile, fell right in between those two indexes, dropping 27% over the course of the year.
The decline of a longstanding stalwart like Apple highlights trends that thrust the U.S. economy into uncertainty in 2022, leaving it in a precarious position as the new year begins, analysts told ABC News.
The forces that have squeezed Apple and the wider economy include a shift from pandemic-era consumption that flipped the fortunes of companies large and small, a near-historic rise in inflation that triggered an aggressive response from the Federal Reserve and supply chain disruptions that eased but persisted with zero-COVID lockdowns in China, analysts said.
“You’re talking about $1 trillion wiped out from the economy in one stock – it’s a big number and it isn’t something that should be ignored,” Angelo Zino, senior industry analyst at CFRA Research, told ABC News.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Why Apple lost nearly $1 trillion in value in 2022 and what it says about the state of the U.S. economy.
Consumer tastes change as pandemic fears wane
Like many tech companies, Apple has suffered from a major consumer shift away from the pandemic-era focus on buying goods.
At the height of the pandemic, hundreds of millions across the globe facing lockdowns replaced restaurant expenditures with couches, exercise bikes and tech products. Over the first three months of 2021, for instance, Apple’s profits more than doubled compared to the same period a year prior.
“People were home buying computers, playing with gadgets and consumer electronics – all the things that Apple sells,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told ABC News.
As pandemic fears have waned, however, consumers have prioritized spending on the experiences they missed out on while cooped up indoors. This fall, demand for personal computers plunged nearly 20% compared to the year prior, research firm Gartner found.
That change in taste has punished the bottom line of Apple and many tech firms, Zandi said.
“Since the pandemic has been winding down, people have been shifting spending away from consumer electronics to travel, restaurants and ball games,” he said.
Inflation rises and aggressive interest rate hikes follow
Apple has also faced challenges rooted in rapid price hikes and the Federal Reserve’s policy response, which has slowed some areas of the economy and pummeled the stock market.
At its peak, inflation reached 9.1% in June, a level last seen more than four decades ago. To dial back the rising costs, the Federal Reserve has undertaken an aggressive set of interest rate hikes.
An increase to the benchmark interest rate raises borrowing costs for consumers and businesses, which in theory should slash inflation by slowing the economy and eating away at demand. That means borrowers, whether businesses or individuals, have a harder time accessing loans, the lifeblood of economic activity.
Because interest rate hikes typically weigh on the economy and corporate earnings, investors flee. That pain is particularly acute for tech stocks like Apple because investors choose them in the first place for strong profit growth, which appears increasingly unlikely as interest rates jump, Zandi said.
“Investors are buying their stocks because of expected profit growth long into the future,” he said. “They get hit hard.”
High prices and rising borrowing costs can also weigh on consumers, eating away at savings and casting aside spending on items like iPhones or MacBooks.
Consumer spending proved resilient for much of the year due in part to savings from the pandemic, but the cushion appears to have dwindled in recent months. The personal savings rate fell to 2.3% in October, the lowest rate in nearly two decades, according to data from the Commerce Department.
“The state of the consumer is extremely important for a company like Apple,” said Zino, adding that the company could withstand a potential drop in consumer spending because products like the iPhone are treated by many as necessities.
Supply chain bottlenecks
Like a host of companies, Apple has struggled with pandemic-imposed supply chain disruptions that have hindered production and caused delivery delays.
While the worst of the global supply backup has eased, impediments remain, most notably in China.
The manufacturing behemoth’s “zero-COVID” policy has triggered intermittent shutdowns, forcing factories to close and production to halt.
“Apple has huge operations in China,” Zandi said.
At China’s biggest iPhone factory, in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, workers vanished over concerns that executives would impose a mandatory quarantine because of a recent COVID outbreak.
On the whole, China’s zero-COVID policy led to major iPhone shortages heading into the holidays, according to a report released by Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives last month. Shortages reached as low as 35% of typical holiday inventory in some stores, causing overall iPhone demand to outstrip supply by a ratio of 3 to 1, he found.
In recent weeks, China has relaxed its zero-COVID policy, offering a glimmer of hope for companies with major supply hubs in the country, like Apple, analysts said.
The China-related delays in the delivery of some iPhone models should be “largely resolved” by some point in January, Zino said.
While many expect a wave of coronavirus infections as the country reopens, manufacturing production could return to normal in the spring or summer of 2023, Zandi said.
(WASHINGTON) — Grubhub has been ordered to pay a $3.5 million settlement after the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit over the food delivery service’s alleged deceptive practices.
On Friday, Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine announced the decision against Grubhub “for charging customers hidden fees and using deceptive marketing techniques to increase profits in violation of District consumer protection laws.”
The District of Columbia sued Grubhub in March for alleged violations of the District’s Consumer Protection and Procedures Act.
D.C.-area customers will collectively be awarded $2.7 million, which Racine said “will be paid back to affected customers.”
“Those with active Grubhub accounts will receive a refundable credit and if the credit is not used within 90 days the money will be sent to customers in the form of a check,” he said.
Additionally, the meal delivery service platform will have to pay $800,000 in civil penalties to the District of Columbia.
“Grubhub used every trick in the book to manipulate customers into paying far more than they owed, and even worse, they did so at the height of a global pandemic when District residents were already struggling to make ends meet,” Racine said in a statement.
He added, “Grubhub’s hidden fees and misleading marketing tactics were designed to get the company an extra buck at the expense of DC residents — but we’re not letting them get away with it. No company, big or small, can take advantage of DC residents without consequence.”
As part of the settlement, GrubHub will be required to more clearly note additional fees associated with your order.
“Settling this lawsuit is in the best interest of our business and the matter is now resolved,” the company said in a statement. “Grubhub is committed to supporting all restaurants and diners, and is taking a number of steps to ensure price transparency.”
ABC News’ Beatrice Peterson contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — After more than 15,000 flights were canceled over the Christmas holiday, leaving thousands of travelers in a lurch, Southwest Airlines says it’s finally catching up.
The airline said it plans to resume normal operations Friday with “minimal disruptions.” In an exclusive interview with ABC News’ Good Morning America, company CEO Bob Jordan said his airline is “off to a great start.”
“I’m watching the stats and we’ve launched the East Coast and have a great operation under way. It’s our full schedule, 3,900 plus flights,” Jordan said. “I’m very confident we’ll operate a really tight operation today.”
The travel mess began just days before Christmas, as wintery weather hit parts of the U.S. Thousands of passengers were left stranded and some even missed their trips altogether.
Southwest said it is committed to refunding its customers for their canceled flights, as well as other travel-related expenses such as hotels, rental cars and even airfare booked through other airlines.
Other costs will be handled on a case-by-case basis, executives said.
“Our desire is to go above and beyond. We always take care of our customers, that’s our 51-year history here at Southwest Airlines,” Jordan said. “We’ll be looking at and taking care of things like rental cars, hotel rooms, meals, booking customers on other airlines, so that will all be part of what we’re covering here as we reimburse our customers and make good on this issue.”
Refunds are currently underway but officials admitted that clearing the backlog would “take weeks.”
Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called on Southwest to process the refunds in a timely manner, saying his agency would “ensure” the airline complies with its refund obligations and could “penalize” the carrier “if they fail to meet what is required of them to take care of passengers.”
“Under the law, Southwest must provide prompt refunds when a carrier cancels a passenger’s flight or makes a significant change in the flight, regardless of the reason, unless the passenger accepts rebooking,” Buttigieg said in a letter to Southwest earlier this week. “This means Southwest must provide refunds within seven business days if a passenger paid by credit card, and within 20 days if a passenger paid by cash, check or other means.”
The winter storm impacted Southwest far more than its competitors, and Jordan said Southwest, “had impacts beyond the storm.”
“We had record temperatures that did things like froze jetways, froze aircraft, froze de-icing fluid. When you’re trying to solve a problem in so many locations, it becomes very, very difficult. Airlines count on the aircraft and the passengers and the crew members continuing to move and when all that shuts down in so many locations it becomes very, very tough,” Jordan said. “It really was the scope of the problems attempting to be solved, just to move crews around, keep the airline moving.”
Just before the final holiday weekend of the year, Southwest now faces the challenge of winning back customers’ trust. Jordan said beyond safety, there’s “no greater focus” than taking care of customers.
“This is impacting so many people, so many customers over the holidays. It’s impacted our employees and I’m extremely sorry for that. There’s just no way almost to apologize enough because we love our customers, we love our people and really impacted their plans,” Jordan said. “There will be a lot of lessons learned that come out of this. We already had a great plan to invest in tools and technology and processes as we always do, but there will be a lot of lessons learned in terms of what we can do to make sure this never happens again.”
(NEW YORK) — Elon Musk earlier this month pledged to step down as the head of Twitter as soon as he finds someone “foolish enough to take the job.”
Musk’s tentative resignation followed a Twitter poll posted by the billionaire entrepreneur in which 57.5% of respondents called on Musk to stop leading the company. Musk said he will retain control over the software and server departments, important teams that will grant him significant control over how the social media platform operates.
It remains possible that Musk may reverse his decision to step down, since he has changed his mind about previous policy decisions at Twitter, such as a proposed content moderation council, which he ultimately abandoned.
He hasn’t shared further details on the search for a successor or the traits he’s looking for in one, but that ambiguity hasn’t stopped some candidates from putting their names forward, including rapper Snoop Dogg and YouTube personality Mr. Beast.
Still, a set of viable candidates will likely emerge in the coming weeks or months.
The position brings formidable challenges. Musk, who admitted he overpaid for the platform at the purchasing price of $44 billion, said last month that the company was losing $4 million a day.
Since Musk retains a major public profile and ultimate authority as owner, the incoming CEO will need to implement Musk’s vision and cede the spotlight, Peter Harms, a professor of management at the University of Alabama who has studied corporate leadership, told ABC News.
“It’s not going to be your typical CEO,” Harms said.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Here’s a list of who could be the next CEO of Twitter:
People close to Elon Musk
The next CEO of Twitter is perhaps most likely to come from a group of people close to Musk, whether inside or outside the company.
Jason Calacanis, a friend and public supporter of Musk, carries years of experience in tech and media. A former general manager at Netscape, Calacanis now works as an angel investor with stakes in Robinhood and Uber, among other startup successes.
Another friend of Musk’s, David Sacks, is co-founder and partner at a venture capital firm called Craft, which boasts investments in Lyft, Palantir, Slack and Twitter.
Earlier this month, Calacanis tweeted a poll asking users whether he, Sacks, or a partnership of the two should run Twitter after Musk. The response that garnered the most support was “Other,” which drew 39% of the vote.
A couple of other individuals in Musk’s orbit have drawn attention since his resignation announcement: Sriram Krishnan, a former Twitter employee brought back by Musk in October to help make improvements; and Steve Davis, the CEO of another Musk venture called The Boring Company, who reportedly slept at Twitter headquarters with his wife and newborn to help out with the acquisition, business publication The Information reported.
John Legere
Amid the flurry of half-joking celebrity requests asking to lead Twitter, an experienced candidate volunteered himself for the position: John Legere, former CEO of telecom company T-Mobile.
Legere, who led T-Mobile from 2012 to 2020, drew plaudits for rescuing T-Mobile from difficult times and making it the third-largest mobile carrier in the U.S.
In a Twitter post addressed to Musk, in November, Legere said, “You can stop managing daily business, and ‘content moderation’ and then support product/technology, let someone else ‘run’ @Twitter.”
“I’m expensive but so is what you paid for Twitter,” he added.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor of management at Yale University who convenes gatherings of top CEOs, told ABC News that Legere’s skills match the job, since he knows how to resurrect a well-established company.
Legere “could parachute in tomorrow and make it a lot better,” Sonnenfeld said. “This is a turnaround, a recovery, not an entrepreneurial start up.”
For his part, Musk appeared to rebuke Legere’s candidacy. In response to Legere’s post suggesting he lead the company, Musk simply tweeted, “no.” However, Musk has reversed his position on major decisions before, including the acquisition of Twitter.
Jack Dorsey
Another potential candidate to run Twitter is former CEO Jack Dorsey, a friend of Musk’s who departed the company and returned to lead it on a previous occasion.
Dorsey, who helped found the social media company, posted the platform’s first tweet in 2006 and was named CEO a year later. However, his tenure only lasted until 2008. Years later, however, as user growth plateaued and employee morale flagged, Dorsey came back to lead the company from 2015 to 2021.
Currently, Dorsey runs Block, a fintech company formerly called Square, which he co-founded more than a decade ago.
The return of a former Twitter CEO, like Dorsey, may be unlikely, since Musk has reversed some of the company’s previous policies and sharply criticized others. The company’s decision to ban former President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 attack, one of the most high-profile choices made under Dorsey, was undone by Musk last month.
Further, Musk has granted journalists access to internal company documents for a series of stories called the “Twitter Files,” in which they allege bias and censorship previously undertaken by the platform.
Meanwhile, Dorsey said in May that he does not want the role of CEO. When a user predicted that Musk would ultimately appoint Dorsey as CEO, Dorsey replied, “Nah I’ll never be CEO again.”
Sheryl Sandberg
Few potential candidates boast the qualifications of Sheryl Sandberg, who stepped down as chief operating officer at Facebook-parent Meta in September.
Facing a pause in advertising from major brands, Sandberg could restore the platform’s credibility on Madison Avenue and ensure that the company optimizes revenue through other means.
Sandberg, who joined Meta in 2008, led a dramatic increase in Facebook’s revenue by revamping its advertising business, turning the operation into an industry powerhouse that helped small and large businesses target users through data collected by the platform. Before that, she served as vice president of global online sales and operations at Google.
She worked closely with Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for nearly 15 years, navigating a relationship with a higher-ranking, tech-focused executive that bears resemblance to the possible dynamic between an incoming Twitter CEO and Musk.
But the sources of potential tension between Musk and Sandberg are manifold. Sandberg holds a significant public profile of her own, built in part on Lean In, a 2013 book that encouraged women to be assertive in the workplace. A powerful CEO, as Sandberg would likely be, could face disputes with Musk over the direction of the company.
Musk and Sandberg could also clash over their political views, especially as content moderation remains a polarizing issue. Sandberg was a major donor to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. By contrast, Musk last month encouraged Americans to vote for Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.
(NEW YORK) — Apple is facing a proposed class action lawsuit alleging the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor is racially biased against people with dark skin tones.
Experts say accuracy problems have been reported for these devices industry-wide. It’s not clear if Apple’s products are any better or worse than others.
The product’s feature, the Blood Oxygen app, allows users to measure their blood oxygen level directly from their wrist, according to Apple’s website.
The lawsuit claims plaintiff Alex Morales was aware of this feature when he purchased an Apple Watch between 2020 and 2021, assuming it would work “without regard to skin tone.”
Morales alleges Apple did not disclose any potential “biases and defects” on the product’s label, despite a large body of research indicating similar pulse oximetry devices — usually placed on a fingertip — were “significantly less accurate in measuring blood oxygen levels based on skin color,” the lawsuit states.
“The ‘real world significance’ of this bias lay unaddressed until the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, which converged with a greater awareness of structural racism which exists in many aspects of society,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed on Dec. 24.
Pulse oximetry devices were widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic to monitor patients’ conditions, which would help determine whether they received certain medicines, oxygen therapies and hospital beds when all were in limited supply.
The devices work by shining a light into a person’s finger or wrist and sensing how much is absorbed by their red blood cells, ABC News medical contributor Dr. Darien Sutton said.
“How much light is absorbed tells you how much oxygen you have because red blood cells carry oxygen,” he said. “The problem is that darker skin also absorbs light, so it can give you a falsely elevated reading.”
While it has been known for decades that the technology tends to overestimate oxygen levels for darker-skinned patients, recent medical studies highlighted the negative impact on such patients. For example, Hispanic and Black patients with the coronavirus were less likely to be recognized as eligible for treatment, according to a study published in May.
Researchers say reliance on the technology and the potentially flawed readings it yielded may have contributed to greater deaths among Black and other dark-skinned patients during the pandemic.
In light of these studies, the Food and Drug Administration recently launched a review of pulse oximeter technology to improve its efficacy and accuracy for all skin pigmentations.
It is unclear if Apple’s technology carries the same problem. An October study found the commercial smartwatch’s blood oxygen sensor is on par with “medical grade” devices, though there was no mention of including people of color in the study.
Apple did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment. The company released its own observational study in June, which found that blood oxygen level readings were not meaningfully different between white Apple Watch wearers and nonwhite users.
The company’s website also states that measurements taken with the Blood Oxygen app are “not intended for medical use and are only designed for general fitness and wellness purposes.” Pulse oximeters used in hospitals must meet a higher standard of testing and accuracy, Sutton said.
Doctors stress that anyone who is struggling to breathe should seek emergency care, and at-home devices are prone to false readings due to human error, and a range of other issues.
While the website makes no mention of a user’s natural skin color interfering with the device, it does include a disclaimer that “permanent or temporary changes to your skin, such as some tattoos, can also impact performance” of the Blood Oxygen app. In 2015, several Apple Watch users said their black wrist tattoos interfered with the device’s heart rate sensor.
Morales filed the lawsuit on behalf of all New Yorkers who purchased an Apple Watch during the statutes of limitations. He also sued on behalf of residents in Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming under those states’ consumer fraud laws.
The lawsuit also accuses Apple of breaches of express warranty, fraud and unjust enrichment, claiming violations of New York General Business Law and State Consumer Fraud Acts.
Morales’ attorney Spencer Sheehan told ABC News that as scientists work to improve pulse oximeter technology, Apple has an obligation to be transparent with consumers about its devices’ possible flaws.
“It’s not comfortable to recognize and to acknowledge that this technology has an inherent bias,” Sheehan said. “But I think that we have to do that in order to chart a better path forward, to have a technology that does a better job in terms of the information it provides without accounting for a person’s skin tone.”
(NEW YORK) — A massive storm has triggered widespread flight cancellations, most notably at Southwest Airlines, which has canceled more than 15,000 flights since last week, stranding droves of customers during peak holiday travel season.
The problems continued for passengers on Thursday, when Southwest canceled about 2,300 flights or 58% of its flights scheduled for that day, according to flight tracking site FlightAware. But the company said in a statement that it plans to return to “normal operations with minimal disruptions” on Friday.
After a flight cancellation, airlines are typically willing to rebook passengers on the next available flight. Since flights are scarce and some airlines are overwhelmed, customers may prefer a refund.
Any potential refund depends on a passenger’s communication with the airline, Clint Henderson, a managing editor for news at The Points Guy, told ABC News.
“Be your own best advocate,” he said. “You really have to appeal to the airline directly – there’s no third party that takes care of it for you.”
Here’s how to get a refund if your flight has been canceled:
Seek a cash refund for the ticket
If an airline cancels a flight and a customer decides that he or she does not want to rebook an alternative one, the customer is entitled to a full refund by law, according to the Department of Transportation. That requirement applies no matter the reason for the flight cancellation, the agency said.
In such a circumstance, the customer can demand reimbursement directly from the airline, Henderson said.
“A lot of times airlines will try to give you a voucher but you’re entitled to cash back,” he said.
Pursue a refund for food, lodging and other expenses
In light of the holiday disruption that has stranded many customers, Southwest Airlines has vowed to “honor reasonable requests for reimbursement for meals, hotel, and alternate transportation,” the company said.
The offer to refund non-flight expenses only stands for customers who suffered a cancellation or “significant delay” between Dec. 24 and Jan. 2, Southwest Airlines said.
It remains unclear exactly what costs Southwest Airlines will cover. Before affected customers take on sizable costs, they should note that “there’s a lot of wiggle room in the word ‘reasonable,'” Henderson said.
Ultimately, Southwest Airlines will refund customers for food, travel and lodging fees, even if they exceed typical rates, Henderson predicted, since the company will want to restore its reputation and respond to criticism from elected officials.
“I do think they’ll make good even if you’re spending $1,000 on a last-minute flight or renting a car for $300 a day or airport hotel prices jumped dramatically and you spend $500 a night for a hotel,” he said.
Send receipts to the airline as soon as possible
Southwest Airlines has posted a web page where customers can submit receipts for expenses that resulted from travel disruptions over the holidays.
The company has warned, however, that reimbursements may take an extended period of time due to the severity of the current problems.
“As our focus remains on stabilizing and restarting our operation, of which we’re seeing very positive signs, our teams will then take on the task of processing the requests. It will take some time given the scale,” Southwest Airlines told ABC News.
In turn, customers can expedite the process as much as possible by submitting receipts to the company soon after the relevant purchases.
Henderson said he did not know how long reimbursements would take but said customers should not expect them anytime soon.
“Usually this kind of thing takes weeks and weeks, if not months,” he said. “I don’t think there will be a speedy timeline.”
