CashCall Eavesdropping Class Action Lawsuit Recertification Denied

Last Friday, Class recertification for the CashCall eavesdropping class action lawsuit was denied by a California appeals court, ruling that certification for this case would require an individual evaluation of each potential Class Member’s experience with the alleged CashCall call monitoring. The CashCall class action lawsuit claims the company eavesdropped and/or secretly monitored calls made to consumers’ telephones.

According to the court’s ruling, the motion for recertification of the CashCall eavesdropping class action lawsuit would only survive if the plaintiffs could demonstrate “they had an ‘objectively reasonable expectation’  their conversations would not be secretly monitored,” but based on arguments filed by CashCall this requirement might make “a continued class action unmanageable.”

The California Court of Appeals agreed that the burden of proof in this eavesdropping class action lawsuit would fall on a number of individual factors, including how many, if any, times the caller heard a CashCall monitoring disclosure during the allegedly monitored calls in comparison with their experience with call monitoring from other businesses.

After the unanimous panel agreement on the future of the CashCall eavesdropping class action lawsuit, U.S. Justice Judith L. Haller stated, “The plaintiffs had a continuing ongoing business relationship with the defendant, during which many plaintiffs may have heard a monitoring disclosure statement at least once. A jury could logically distinguish between these plaintiffs on the issue whether each had a reasonable expectation the conversation would not be overheard.”

Essentially, while the lead plaintiffs claim they were under the belief that their CashCall communications were not monitored, a judge, jury, or panel would have to make individual evaluations for Class Members if they also held  a “reasonable expectation” that their calls were not monitored.

This is the second time that a California Appeals Court has stepped in to mediate claims since the CashCall eavesdropping class action lawsuit was revived in 2011. After the Class was granted certification by San Diego Superior court, CashCall argued the eavesdropping charges could not reasonably apply to CashCall’s call monitoring situation, since the individuals monitoring the calls were other CashCall employees, not a third party company.

Although CashCall’s summary judgment on this issue was initially granted, the appeals court reversed this decision, reasoning that under California penal code, individuals had the right to know who was monitoring their CashCall phone conversation, whether or not it was another CashCall employee or a third party entity.

The same San Diego court decertified the CashCall eavesdropping Class, ruling that individual Class Member and plaintiff’s relationships with CashCalls would make managing the Class extremely difficult and time consuming. While this does ruling does not completely dismiss the eavesdropping class action lawsuit, it will continue to prolong the already eight years of litigation.

The CashCall eavesdropping class action lawsuit was originally filed in 2006 and claimed that 225 inbound calls and 332 outbound service calls were randomly monitored by the loan company without consistently informing all customers that another CashCall employee or manager was allegedly eavesdropping on the call for quality control purposes.

The plaintiffs are represented by Douglas J. Campion of Law Offices of Douglas J. Campion and Joshua B. Swigart of Hyde & Swigart.

The CashCall Eavesdropping Class Action Lawsuit is Amanda Knight, et al. v. CashCall Inc., Case No. D063363, in the Court of Appeal of the State of California, Fourth Appellate District.