TCPA Lawsuit: May a Consumer Revoke Consent?

In the United States, laws restrict the methods that companies can contact consumer. However, only lawsuit is asking out whether or not consumers can revoke permission for companies to call them once consent is granted.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA, is designed to control telemarketing. The TCPA establishes strict guidelines for companies trying to contact large numbers of consumers. While the law was written with robocalls and fax machine spam in mind, subsequent amendments and court rulings have established that the TCPA applies to text messages and telemarketing calls to cellular phones.

Restrictions by the TCPA hold that companies cannot contact customers through certain channels without a pre-established relationship with the customer. More specifically, companies are forbidden from cold-contacting customers via fax, phone, text message, and other means.

One particular target of the TCPA is robocalls, also called autodialers. This technology allows telemarketers to mass-call customers with prerecorded messages. However, all of the provisions of the TCPA are built around the assumption that a customer has not given the company permission to contact them in the first place.

There is a TCPA lawsuit still still underway in appellate court to determine if a consumer can revoke permission to contact them with pre-recorded messages or mass text messages after they have already given it.

In 2012, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a ruling that implied that consumers can revoke their consent to receive communications from a company. Since then, a number of rulings have cited this statement as evidence that the FCC, the agency responsible for enforcement of the TCPA, endorses the idea that a consumer can revoke their prior consent.

This started with a TCPA lawsuit called Gager v. Dell Financial Services, filed in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In this case, the judge ruled that the underlying terms of a credit agreement did not waive obligations under the TCPA for debt collectors.

Across other appellate courts, similar rulings have implied, but not explicitly stated, that a consumer can revoke their consent for receiving automated communications and other potential TCPA violations.

While the issue has not been fully sorted out by the court system, the general trend is towards the idea that consumers can revoke their consent for receiving automated calls from companies. As such, customers who have received robocalls after telling a company not to contact them this way may be able to file a TCPA lawsuit over these unsolicited phone calls.

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If you were contacted on your cell phone by a company via an unsolicited text message (text spam) or prerecorded voice message (robocall), you may be eligible for compensation under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

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