Ally Financial TCPA Lawsuit Seeks Damages for Unwelcome Calls

A New York woman has filed an Ally Financial TCPA lawsuit alleging the company’s unwelcome calls to her mobile phone violated federal law.

Plaintiff Jennifer D. alleges Ally Financial has been using an automated telephone dialing system to call her on her mobile phone repeatedly over the last four years.

She alleges these calls have continued at an unacceptable frequency, despite her repeated demands that they stop. She claims she received five discrete calls from Ally in a single day on February 1, 2016, and she alleges having received as many as six calls on other days.

Jennifer says she never wanted to be contacted on her mobile phone by means of an autodialer or prerecorded message. On several occasions, Jennifer says she told Ally Financial to stop making these calls. Yet the calls kept coming, she claims.

Jennifer now alleges these calls were violations of the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act. “The TCPA prohibits auto-dialed calls which are placed to a called party’s cellular phone without that party’s consent,” according to her Ally Financial TCPA lawsuit.

Congress passed the TCPA in response to growing displeasure with intrusive telemarketing phone calls made even more pervasive “due to the increased use of cost-effective telemarketing techniques.”

Senator Hollings, the sponsor of the TCPA, referred to these unwanted phone calls as “the scourge of modern civilization,” Jennifer says.

Jennifer believes several aspects of these calls indicate they were made using an automated telephone dialing system.

She cites the caller’s use of prerecorded messages, the placement of up to six calls per day, the hold music she heard when she answered, the sound of clicks and pauses before a live human would respond on the other end, the “methodical” placement of between three and six calls daily, and the placement of back-to-back calls after she answered or ignored the first call.

Ally Financial TCPA Lawsuit Seeks Statutory Damages

The TCPA allows plaintiffs to claim statutory damage awards for each violation.

Jennifer’s Ally Financial TCPA lawsuit seeks an award of $500 in statutory damages for each phone call by the defendant that is found to violate the TCPA.

She is asking the court to triple that award to the maximum amount of $1,500 per violation for each phone call that is found to be a “willful” violation.

Notwithstanding her request for statutory damages, Jennifer also alleges these phone calls have caused her actual harm.

She claims these calls “deprived her of the use of her cellular phone during the times that the Defendant was calling her phone,” and that they also depleted her phone’s battery.

The voicemails that defendant allegedly left reduced her voicemail inbox capacity, she says. She claims they deprived her of the use of her voicemail entirely when they filled her inbox to capacity.

She further claims these calls violated her right to privacy and seclusion. She says she was left “harassed, stressed, frustrated and annoyed” because of the defendant’s insistence on repeatedly calling her despite her own repeated requests for them to stop.

These calls interrupted her day, wasted her time and interfered with her job by calling her during her working hour, Jennifer alleges.

The Ally Financial TCPA Lawsuit is Case No. 2:16-cv-04504 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

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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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