Whistleblowers Want to Revive Fraud Suit Against UScellular Successor

WASHINGTON, Dec. 11, 2025 – A pair of telecom attorneys are pushing for the Supreme Court to reverse a decision that ended a fraud lawsuit against Array Digital Infrastructure, formerly UScellular.

In February, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dismissed a case in which Mark O’Connor and Sara Leibman, a former FCC attorney, sued Array under the False Claims Act, which mandates higher penalties for fraudulently seeking government cash. They alleged Array used smaller subsidiaries to obtain spectrum auction bidding credits and buy spectrum for more than $100 million less than it could have on its own.

Array, formerly the fifth largest wireless carrier in the country, changed its name after selling those operations and a chunk of spectrum to T-Mobile for $4.3 billion. It now operates its roughly 4,400 towers.

The D.C. Circuit ruled in part that O’Connor and Liebman hadn’t alleged enough significant non-public information for the suit to be valid under the FCA. The pair argued that didn’t make much sense, as later this year the same panel of circuit judges reached the opposite conclusion in a separate lawsuit they filed focused on another Array subsidiary involved in the alleged scheme.

“These two cases involve the same relators, the same fraud scheme with many of the same defendants, and the same legal standard, with opposite results,” their lawyers wrote in a Wednesday filing with the Supreme Court. “Any standard that produces the divergent results in these related cases is broken.” 

The whistleblowers said they had provided independent engineering studies that prompted government investigators to uncover an internal sharing agreement. The DOJ declined to pursue a case against Array.

Array wants to leave the D.C. Circuit dismissal intact

Array has argued justices should not take the case and leave the D.C. Circuit dismissal intact. The company said in a Nov. 26 brief that the court had simply been following a clear standard in line with other circuits, and that the attorneys had only added “some additional color” to the allegations.

Leibman and O’Connor want the case taken for a separate reason. They say that, under more recent Supreme Court precedent, it was dismissed too early and they should have had the chance to prove they were the original source of some already public information, a separate path to a valid FCA case. 

Justices are set to deliberate on whether to take the case on Jan. 9, 2026. 

In the other D.C. Circuit decision, handed down in October, judges said the whistleblowers made plausible enough allegations based on non-public information. The case was sent back to the D.C. District Court for more proceedings.

Array also got FCC approval for another $1 billion spectrum sale to AT&T this month. 

The AT&T sale involved some of the spectrum at issue in the FCA cases, about $232 million by Array’s count. Leibman and O’Connor tried to convince the FCC to pause the deals while their cases played out, but the agency declined to do so.

Array also has a pending $1 billion spectrum sale to Verizon.