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

The lawsuit is the latest in legal issues T-Mobile is facing in relation to how it handles sensitive customer data.

• 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 has not indicated how they plan to prevent similar incidents happening in the future.

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 T-Mobile employee who had handled her phone earlier that day.

The lawsuit states that as she tried to investigate what had happened, T-Mobile denied that any trade-ins had taken place that day and 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.

"This was an employee of a third-party authorized retailer, and he was terminated," said a T-mobile spokesperson in a statement to CNBC.

"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. We have policies and procedures in place to protect customer information and expect them to be followed," the statement.

T-Mobile did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside regular working hours.