COST OF CUTTING CORNERS: Wallet Buddha Suffers Humiliating Arbitration Loss After Basic Evidentiary Failure and Lead Buyers Should Take Note

So just got done covering a massive arbitration WIN by Rocket– very impressive– and now I get to cover a humiliating loss by Wallet Buddha on the same issue that probably never should have happened.

In Ellis v. Wallet Buddha, 2025 WL 4061562 (C.D. Cal. Dec. 29, 2026) the Court refused to enforce arbitration in favor of the defendant– meaning it is stuck in a potential multi-billion dollar class action–all because it failed to introduce admissible evidence of what the webform looked like at the time the plaintiff allegedly visited it.

I’m serious.

In Ellis Wallet Buddha allegedly sent unwanted text messages to the plaintiff without consent.

Wallet Buddha had bought a lead from LendYou, which Wallet Buddha claimed included its name on its marketing partner page (you see where this is going.)

But while Buddha’s claim of being a “marketing partner” probably would have lost anyway– you generally have to be a party to the arbitration agreement not just a marketing partner in the ninth circuit– the Court never even got to that issue because Wallet Buddha had failed to even introduce admissible evidence of the LendYou site to begin with.

Pause.

That’s just insane,

Any first year lawyer knows you have to introduce admissible evidence of the contract you’d like to enforce. And in the context of a lead generation flow you need to go TO THE SOURCE of the website (or perhaps to Active Prospect or the like) to get that admissible evidence.

Wallet Buddha didn’t do that.

Instead it submitted a declaration from its own CEO Noam Samson. Samson declared: “(1) that Plaintiff visited LendYou’s website; (2) that Plaintiff submitted a “Request Form,” entering his personal information; and (3) that Plaintiff agreed to an arbitration agreement in order to submit the Request Form.”

There’s an obvious problem here though– Samson lacks personal knowledge of any of these facts and cannot authenticate LendYou’s form:

But Defendant does not establish how Samson would have personal knowledge of the fact that any action putatively taken by Plaintiff on LendYou’s website would constitute assent to LendYou’s arbitration agreement. (See Samson Decl. ¶ 8). Even if the Court could conclude that Plaintiff visited the LendYou website, submitted his personal information through that website, and that Plaintiff’s personal information somehow made its way to Defendant, Defendant has not proven that in submitting that information, Plaintiff necessarily agreed to an arbitration provision, let alone the specific contents of that arbitration provision… But there is no basis in Samson’s declaration to establish his knowledge of the content of the LendYou website at the time that Plaintiff putatively visited this website. Put more simply, Samson has not established in his declaration that he is responsible for developing or updating LendYou’s webpages or its Request Form, such that he would know what content appeared on the webpage at the point in time that Plaintiff visited the webpage.

Eesh.

The Court is dead on here. The rules of evidence are simple and inflexible. If you can’t comply with them you can’t win– even if you should.

And it was NOT enough that the defendant visited the website AFTER the fact and provided screenshots:

These assertions do not cure the issue. Indeed, the footnote merely underlines that Samson or someone at his direction went
to the public LendYou website and took the screenshots of the webpages as they appeared on the particular day that they were
investigating Plaintiff’s claims. This effort falls short of what would be required to prove what Plaintiff saw when he visited
the website in July or September of 2024.

Really sad to see this. But when lawyers cut corners losses like this are bound to happen.

Take aways here:

1. If you want to enforce a third-party website form you MUST obtain admissible evidence of the content of that form on the date and time in question. Again Active Prospect forms (and similar forms) are useful but you really want to put yourself in a position to have a declaration directly from the website operator;
2. Declarations from employees of the lead buyer are NOT going to be sufficient;
3. Print outs of the webform taken after the events in question are NOT going to be sufficient.

Again this is basic stuff most lawyers understand but being prepared to document consent events is not something everybody in the industry really “gets.” Hopefully it will be now.

Make sure you attend Law Conference of Champions this May so you do NOT MISS on critical issues like this one!

Tickets will sell out soon–and prices rise shortly– so get in now!

Chat soon.