You might not be surprised to hear that Time Warner Cable mistreated a consumer; you might delight in hearing that a New York judge is making TWC pay $230,000 to an aggrieved consumer. But Judge Alvin Hellerstein’s ruling is particularly stern, and offers enough schadenfreude that it’s worth a quick scan. It’s also worth noting that the winner here, Araceli King of Texas, owes a good deal of her winnings to the Federal Communications Commission, which issued a declaratory ruling just last month that paved the way to Hellerstein’s findings. (I wrote about that last month, as it factored into the PayPal robocalling controversy).
The case is simple. Time Warner kept robocalling King’s cell phone trying to collect a past due bill — 163 times. The problem is King had a recycled cell phone number, and Time Warner wasn’t really trying to call King, but instead the number’s previous owner.
King told Time Warner to stop calling her. Time Warner did not. King sued. Time Warner still kept calling.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act — the law that created the Do Not Call list — provides a clear incentive for companies to avoid harassing consumers. Each offense can be punished with a $500 penalty, payable to the victim. In this case, the issue is robocalls, which cannot be placed to consumers without their express consent.
In court, Time Warner tried to argue that the wrong number calls were an innocent mistake — and that once it had obtained consent from the initial owner of the number, it didn’t need King’s consent to enjoy safe harbor from the penalties.
“TWC argues that, because it intended to reach (the prior owner….that) shields TWC from liability regardless of who actually received the call,” the judge wrote.
Hogwash, he responded.
“This defense would require the Court to interpret the term called party in the statute to mean the intended recipient of the call, rather than the actual recipient or the owner of the called phone line….the Court is not aware of any decision that has found ‘called party’ to mean ‘meant-to-have-called party.’ ”
Further, that aforementioned FCC declaratory ruling made this situation incredibly clear:
“Reassigned Numbers Aren’t Loopholes – If a phone number has been reassigned, companies must stop calling the number after one call,” the FCC said last month.
TWC’s other two defenses were rejected out of hand by the judge. First, the firm tried to say its calls weren’t really robocalls, because the machine placing the calls didn’t pick numbers from a list or at random, but rather selectively.
“(TWC) argues that the list could just as easily have been created by a human. But TWC ignores the fact
that the lists were not created by a human,” the judge wrote.
TWC also argued that it didn’t know it didn’t have consent to call King. Even though she called to complain. And she sued.
“(The) assertion that it lacked such knowledge of non-consent after (her complaint) is incredible. Defendant
harassed Plaintiff with robo-calls until she had to resort to a lawsuit to make the calls stop, and even then TWC could not be bothered to update the information in its IVR system,” the judge wrote. “The calls placed after (the lawsuit was filed) are particularly egregious violations of the TCPA and indicate that TWC simply did not take this lawsuit seriously. Treble damages are unquestionably appropriate to reflect the seriousness of TWC’s willful violations.”
And with that, Hellerstein granted King $500 for each robocall placed after her initial complain…and tripled the damages to $1,500 for willful violation. So 153 x $1,500 = a really good reason to pay attention to consumer protection laws.
Time Warner is now taking the lawsuit seriously. Let’s hope all companies take the Telephone Consumer Protection Act seriously.
H/T to Catey Hill for first calling my attention to this story with her piece at Marketwatch.com.
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