Debt Collection Phone Calls Violate the TCPA, Plaintiff Claims

A woman from Florida says debt collection phone calls she received from a Wisconsin company violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

Plaintiff Marguerite M. says that defendant Ginny’s Inc. began calling her on her mobile phone in 2014, in an attempt to collect a debt.

In one of those debt collection phone calls, Marguerite says, she told the Ginny’s representative that she would not make any payments on the debt and that she wanted Ginny’s to stop calling her.

But Ginny’s continued to call her in attempts to collect the debt through at least March 2015, she claims.

Marguerite believes Ginny’s used an automated telephone dialing system to make these calls, without her consent to being contacted in that way. She says that when she answered the calls, she heard either an automated voice or a prerecorded message, followed by a click, beep or delay before she was connected to an operator.

These calls violated a federal law known as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, according to Marguerite’s claim.

The TCPA makes it unlawful for any person to use an automatic telephone system or an artificial or prerecorded voice to make calls to a mobile phone, unless the call is made for emergency purposes or with the prior express consent of the person being called.

The calls that Ginny’s made to Marguerite’s phone number violated these provisions of the TCPA, Marguerite argues. She is seeking an award of statutory damages at $500 per violation.

She seeks three times those damages for each such violation that was “willful, knowing and intentional,” increasing her damage claim to $1,500 for each such violation.

Marguerite also alleges the debt collection phone calls violate a Florida state law, the Florida Consumer Collection Practices Act.

Among other protections for debtors, the FCCPA provides that persons collecting consumer debts may not engage in certain behavior that can reasonably be considered abusive or harassing. It also forbids collectors from asserting legal rights they know they do not actually have.

Using the TCPA Against Debt Collection Phone Calls

TCPA violations are not limited to debt collection phone calls. The act’s prohibitions also extend to unsolicited telemarketing calls, automatically dialed calls, calls using a prerecorded message, unsolicited text messages, and unsolicited faxes. Businesses of all types can find themselves on the receiving end of a TCPA lawsuit.

The claims in Marguerite’s TCPA lawsuit are relatively modest when compared to those alleged in larger TCPA class action lawsuits. TCPA violations can hotbeds for class action litigation, because if a business uses an automatic dialing system to call one person, it’s likely to also be autodialing entire classes of people.

Larger classes of plaintiffs can drive larger settlement amounts. The statutory demage provisions under the TCPA are not capped, so damages can add up as quickly as the parties’ attorneys can do the math.

TCPA class action lawsuits that raised such claims have resulted in settlements ranging from $6 million to $70 million – at least in cases where the settlement amount has been made public.

The Ginny’s Inc. Debt Collection Phone Calls Lawsuit is Case No. 8:16-cv-1958-T36-AEP in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Tampa Division.

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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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