Mobi – a Hawaiian based MVNO running on Verizon and T-Mobile, seems to have gone out of business – and there were rumors their CEO had fled to Brazil.
So, first, CEO Justen Burdette has NOT fled to Brazil. Fierce Network editor Monica Alleven spoke to Burdette (link below) and Burdette had gone to Canada (where he’s from) but has returned to Hawaii to “tie up lose ends” as Mobi winds down operations.
In recent weeks, Mobi customers have reported that their service was either intermittent or completely shut off, and that their texts and calls to customer service went unanswered.
What happened exactly isn’t clear. Mobi, which has been around 20 years, had signed a multi-year relationship with T-Mobile in 2023 and was working on establishing a cloud-native mobile core, supported by Amazon Web Services. Mobi had about 55,000 subscribers.
According to a lawsuit filed on November 24, the complaint alleges that CEO Justen Burdette fled to Brazil, locked employees out of company systems, and failed to perform under a multimillion-dollar purchase agreement. It further claims that he did not pay $1 million in wages and terminated key executives without proper authorization.
The suit was filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom on behalf of shareholders JB Mobile Holding and Pierre-Emmanuel Durand.
Without warning, customers suddenly found themselves without service — and many were understandably angry. A number of them turned to Reddit to vent and to ask for help figuring out how to port their phone numbers.
For some, that help came too late. One person who identified as a Mobi customer explained that she and her husband had to get new phones and new numbers because they couldn’t access the information needed to transfer their contacts.
According to Burdette “It is very sad and heartbreaking what so many folks worked so many years at Mobi to build,” he said. “We got very close to being able to prove that all out … If I knew what to have done and could go back in time, I would certainly do whatever I could to try to change that.”
Link to Fierce Wireless Story
