Judge Tosses GroupMe Text Spam Class Action Lawsuit

A federal judge in the Northern District of California has dismissed a putative TCPA class action lawsuit against the popular networking company GroupMe, ruling that an automatic telephone dialing system or autodialer was not used when a third-party group provided the number that resulted in the initiation of the automated text by a company to a consumer.

Plaintiff Brian G. filed the TCPA class action against the group-messaging application GroupMe, alleging that GroupMe violated the TCPA when GroupMe transmitted two texts notifying him that he had been added to a group called ‘Poker.’ Brian argued that the group creator never asked GroupMe to send the texts, did not send the texts himself, and was not informed that the texts would be sent.

GroupMe argued that the sent text messages were triggered by the Poker group creator’s addition of Brian to said group. Furthermore, Brian sought to establish that GroupMe’s conduct violated the TCPA even if GroupMe did not use an autodialer, alleging that the texts he received were “artificial prewritten text messages” and thus constituted an “artificial or prerecorded voice,” a TCPA violation.

After reviewing the TCPA text spam class action complaint, the Court granted GroupMe’s motion for summary judgment to dismiss the text spam lawsuit, concluding that GroupMe’s messaging application did not have the capacity to dial numbers without human intervention, as required to be considered an autodialer for TCPA liability purposes. The Court found that the text spam messages were only sent as a direct response to the intervention of the group creator, who provided the GroupMe application interface with the phone numbers of the newly added group members, including Brian’s, and this did not allegedly violate the TCPA restriction about random dialing or text spam.

What is the TCPA?

The TCPA (also known as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act) is a federal privacy law that imposes restrictions on telephone solicitations, including telemarketing calls and text spam messages. Basically, it regulates unsolicited phone calls, text spam, and faxes that utilize autodialers or pre-recorded messages. As of late, the statute has been the basis for several high profile TCPA class action lawsuits and controversy.

The TCPA defines “automatic telephone dialing system” as “equipment which has the capacity (A) to store or produce numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator; and (B) to dial such numbers.”

The root of the controversy is a 2003 Federal Communications Commission opinion that was intended to address the applicability of the TCPA to predictive dialers (computer-connected telephone systems that use software to “predict” when a representative will be available to speak with a consumer). To stretch the autodialer definition to cover a technology used to dial specific, nonrandom, nonsequential numbers, the FCC relied heavily on the statute’s use of the term “capacity” and it has been argued that virtually every modern dialing or text-messaging technology has the “capacity” to qualify as an autodialer.

Under the TCPA, individuals who receive unsolicited phone calls and text message spam can recover between $500 and $1,500 per call if they can prove that the calls or text spam were sent using an “autodialer.” The limitations period is four years and class action damages are uncapped, meaning that a company with a business need to call or text its customers can easily face millions or billions of dollars in potential liability.

The GroupMe Text Spam Lawsuit is Case No. 4:11-cv-02584, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

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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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