The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) imposes significant restrictions on automatically dialed calls, including prohibitions against virtually all automated calls and text messages to cell phones. The TCPA also offers recoveries of $500 per violation, and $1,500 for a willful violation. It is not surprising, therefore, that plaintiffs have been filing more and more class actions under the TCPA in recent years.
Recent Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rulings that “automatic telephone dialing systems” (ATDS) include devices that merely have the future (as opposed to the current) capacity to dial random or preselected lists of phone numbers, and that human intervention in an ATDS’s calling process will not protect the caller if the device qualifies as an ATDS, likely will encourage even more TCPA litigation.
