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Financial Services Law Insights and Observations

District Court: Callers cannot rely on prior cell phone user’s consent to place prerecorded calls

Courts TCPA Consumer Protection Class Action Do Not Call Registry

Courts

On March 9, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina granted in part and denied in part a defendant university’s motion for summary judgment on claims that it unlawfully placed prerecorded calls to reassigned phone numbers based on the previous user’s consent. The plaintiff alleged that the defendant violated the TCPA by calling cellphones without first obtaining the current phone number owner’s prior express consent and making a “telephone solicitation” to individuals listed on the National Do-Not-Call-Registry. The plaintiff also contended that the defendant failed to provide a method for opting-out of receiving future calls. The defendant countered that it could not be held liable for the allegedly unlawful prerecorded calls because it had reasonably relied on the consent of the previous phone number’s user and was unaware that the number had been reassigned.

In partially denying the defendant’s motion for summary judgment, the court ruled that there was “no basis” in the text of the TCPA to conclude that callers who contact a phone number whose previous user provided consent but whose current owner did not could use “a reasonable reliance or good faith defense” to avoid liability. “Congress passed the TCPA to protect individuals from receiving invasive and unsolicited calls,” the court wrote. “Thus, adopting a good faith or reasonable reliance defense not only would have no basis in the text but also would contravene the stated purpose of the TCPA.” The court also declined to adopt the defendant’s “intended party” argument, finding that “[n]either the language nor the concept of an ‘intended’ party appears” in the TCPA, and that every circuit court that has opined on this issue “has concluded that the term ‘called party’ refers to the individual that actually receives the calls, as opposed to the ‘intended party’ of those calls.”

However, the court determined that the plaintiff’s allegation that the defendant violated the TCPA’s prohibitions on contacting numbers on the National Do-Not-Call-Registry cannot proceed “because, as a tax-exempt, non-profit organization, [the defendant] is not subject to the provisions regarding the National Do-Not-Call Registry.”