Plaintiffs Ask Fed. Judge For Class Status in Ocwen Robocall Lawsuit

Ocwen Loan Servicing LLC faces accusations that it violated the TCPA, or the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, for allegedly placing more than “100 million unauthorized calls to roughly 1.2 million borrowers’ cell phones without their explicit consent,” according to court documents.

Friday, the group of consumers filing the lawsuit proposed to an Illinois federal judge to certify the proposed plaintiff class in their Ocwen class action lawsuit.

The Ocwen robocall lawsuit is led by consumer and borrowers Tracee Beecroft and Susan Mansanarez.

The Ocwen robocall lawsuit alleges that between October 2010 and December 2014, Ocwen “had no policy in place for obtaining consent before calling borrowers’ cell phones using its ‘Aspect’ automated telephone dialing system.”

The lead consumers maintain that “although Ocwen made a meager attempt at TCPA compliance ─ it abstained from using its [Aspect] dialer to call phone numbers that were logged in its REALServicing database as ‘cell’ phones.”

The lawsuit further alleges that Ocwen called home, work and other telephone numbers without first determining whether they were cell phones and did not give any regard to consent issues.

According to the lead consumers, phone records obtained from the defendant during the discovery process attest to these allegations. The phone records allegedly show that precisely 105,831,658 unauthorized calls were made to 1.2 million consumers and borrowers.

Additionally, the calls were made to their unique cell phone numbers. According to the certification motion, “the group of borrowers should be certified as a nationwide class.”

In addition to the requested proposed class action lawsuit that includes the consumers who received unauthorized cell phone calls from an automated telephone dialing system, the Ocwen robocall lawsuit also maintains that two additional Classes should also be instated.

Beecroft is attempting to represent an additional subclass of more than 60,000 borrowers who claim that Ocwen used “skip-tracing” to obtain the borrower’s phone numbers through a third party. Ocwen then allegedly called the borrowers to assure that it was “in fact their number.” Plaintiffs claim this action was a clear violation of the TCPA, as the defendant did not obtain the borrowers’ phone numbers directly.

Mansanarez seeks to represent another subclass of nationwide borrowers who had received a cell phone call through the automated dialing system when they had requested not to be called.

The Ocwen robocall lawsuit iterates that common issues surround the lawsuit. These issues include whether “the system Ocwen used to place the calls qualifies as an autodialer, whether Ocwen used that autodialer to place the calls, whether those calls were consensual, and whether or not Ocwen knew it was violating the TCPA.”

According to the Ocwen robocall lawsuit, the predominance factor is satisfied. The Ocwen robocall lawsuit contends that common evidence can be used to discover the consumer that was called and how many times he or she was called.

Additionally, the Ocwen robocall lawsuit states that throughout the times that the calls were made, there was no policy set in place to confirm that calls were not being made to cell phones and for verifying the consent from these consumers were received.

According to the Ocwen robocall lawsuit, “although some borrowers provided their cell phone numbers to Ocwen, such evidence does not defeat predominance. Borrowers who provided consent can be manageably identified by reviewing Ocwen’s business records.”

All in all, the plaintiff are seeking certification for three separate Classes of potential claimants.

A prior lawsuit filed by plaintiff Keith Snyder in October 2014 was later consolidated into this current TCPA lawsuit filed by Beecroft late last year in 2016.

The Ocwen Robocall Lawsuit is Snyder v. Ocwen Loan Servicing LLC, Case No. 1:14­cv­08461, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

UPDATE: November 2017, the Ocwen Loan Servicing robocall class action settlement is now open. Click here to file a claim.

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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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