Summary: A new class action lawsuit filed against Sephora USA Inc claims that the company has discriminated against customers of Asian descent.
USA Inc, a popular cosmetics retailers, has been accused of blocking the online accounts of customers who have Asian names, according to a report from Reuters.
The company has been accused of the wrongdoing in a new lawsuit. The lawsuit also states that the company did so because it suspected the customers would buy discount items to resell them.
The lawsuit, which is a proposed class action, was filed on Tuesday in Manhattan federal court. The plaintiffs are four women who are residents of the United States, but have Chinese descent. They claim their online accounts were deactivated earlier in November due to their Asian surnames.
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The lawsuit is a result of a promotional sale from November 6 that caused the company’s website to crash. Sephora said the crash occurred because a large number of bulk shoppers tried to take advantage of the low prices in order to resell them for a profit.
The lawsuit claims that customers with email addresses from Chinese domains and customers with Asian names were the only ones blocked from the website following the crash. The lawsuit claims that thousands of shoppers might have been affected by the block.
The lawsuit also goes on to say that hundreds of Sephora customers with Asian surnames complained on Facebook that they could not access their accounts.
Sephora’s parent company is LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton Inc. Sephora has more than 1,900 stores in 29 countries and was founded in 1970 in Paris.
The four plaintiffs are Xiao Xiao, Tiantian Zou, Jiali Chen and Man Xu. Xiao and Zou are from New York. Chen is from Ohio and Xu is from Philadelphia.
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[poll id=”244″]Image credit: Reuters
