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Financial Services Law Insights and Observations

District Court partially grants bank’s motion in TCPA case

Courts TCPA Autodialer U.S. Supreme Court Debt Collection Consumer Finance

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On March 3, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky partially granted and partially denied a defendant bank’s motion for summary judgment in a TCPA case. According to the opinion, the plaintiff allegedly did not meet his minimum monthly credit card payments, so the defendant began conducting debt collection calls. The defendant allegedly attempted 574 communications via phone call, prerecorded messages, or text messages, including 111 prerecorded messages, during a 7-month period.

The plaintiff filed suit, alleging the defendant violated the TCPA by contacting him using an automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS) before and after he allegedly revoked consent to be contacted. The district court held that the telephone system used by the defendant to contact the plaintiff did not qualify as an ATDS under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Facebook v. Duguid (Covered by a Buckley Special Alert here), which narrowed the definition of an ATDS under the TCPA. The court was “not persuaded by [the plaintiff’s] argument that [the telephone system] is an ATDS simply because it has the ‘capacity to store telephone numbers using a random or sequential number generator, and then to dial those numbers without human intervention.’”

The plaintiff also argued that the defendant violated the TCPA by sending the 111 prerecorded messages. The court determined that while the plaintiff had initially consented to being contacted by the defendant when he provided his telephone number to create his account, there was a genuine dispute of material fact as to whether the plaintiff subsequently revoked his consent. Even though the defendant submitted seven call recordings between itself and the plaintiff in support of its argument that the plaintiff did not specifically revoke consent, the court explained that “the evidence could lead reasonable minds to differ,” including the plaintiff’s deposition testimony, his request to have information sent to him via mail, his refusal to talk to a collector and hanging up the phone on a subsequent call, and his failure to answer the phone when the defendant called.