Robocall Lawsuits: How a TCPA Case Works From First Call to Payment

The short version

Congress wrote the TCPA so ordinary people could enforce it. Section 227(b)(3) and section 227(c)(5) of Title 47 each give “a person” the right to sue. You do not need a government agency to act first, and you do not need to show the calls cost you money. The law sets a dollar figure per violation.

This section of the site walks through each part of a case. Start wherever your question is.

Who can bring a robocall lawsuit

The person who received the illegal calls or texts is the usual plaintiff. That includes people who never did business with the caller at all, such as someone getting debt collection calls meant for the previous owner of their number. It also includes people who did business with a company but told it to stop.

The type of phone matters. The robocall and autodialer rules in section 227(b) protect cell phones broadly, and restrict prerecorded calls to residential lines. The Do Not Call rule in section 227(c) protects residential subscribers, and the FTC’s registry takes both landline and wireless numbers. Business lines and VoIP numbers raise closer questions a lawyer should look at.

What you can sue for

Most robocall lawsuits rest on one or more of these claims:

• Prerecorded or artificial voice calls to a cell phone without consent, or prerecorded telemarketing to a home line without written consent.
• Autodialed calls or texts to a cell phone without consent. After Facebook v. Duguid (2021), “autodialer” means equipment with the capacity to use a random or sequential number generator, which narrowed this claim.
• Do Not Call violations: more than one telemarketing call or text in 12 months from or for the same company to a registered number.
• Company-specific do-not-call violations: calls after you asked a telemarketer to stop. FCC rules require the request to be honored within ten business days, and for five years, under 47 C.F.R. 64.1200(d).
• Calling-hours violations: telemarketing before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. your local time, under 47 C.F.R. 64.1200(c)(1).

Some states add their own telemarketing laws with separate damages. And debt collectors can face a parallel claim under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.

Where robocall lawsuits are filed

You have a choice of courts. The Supreme Court held in Mims v. Arrow Financial Services (2012) that federal and state courts have concurrent jurisdiction over private TCPA suits. In practice:

• Federal district court is where larger individual cases and class actions such as the Capital One and Dish Network cases were heard. Filing costs a $350 statutory fee plus a $55 administrative fee.
• State court, including small claims, can be faster and cheaper for a handful of calls, subject to each state’s dollar limits and rules.
• A demand letter is not a court at all, but it resolves some claims before anything is filed.

The deadline

The TCPA does not state its own deadline. Courts apply the federal catch-all in 28 U.S.C. 1658(a): four years after the claim accrues. Each call is its own violation with its own four-year clock. So if a company called you 40 times over five years, the most recent four years of calls can still be in play. If you are working with a class action, deadlines to file a claim or opt out are much shorter and are set by the court.

Individual lawsuit or class action

This choice drives what you get paid. An individual case seeks the full statutory amount for each of your calls. A class action spreads one settlement fund across everyone who files a claim. In the Capital One robocall settlement, the court’s approval opinion put the recovery at $34.60 per claimant, compared with a statutory $500 per call. In Krakauer v. Dish Network, a class case that went to trial, the jury awarded $400 per call and the judge tripled it for willfulness.

Class actions still matter. They reach millions of people who would never sue alone, and they can force a company to change practices. But if you have many calls and good records, an individual case may be worth far more to you.

What a robocall lawsuit does not do

• It does not usually reach a scammer overseas who cannot be found or collected from.
• It is not the same as a complaint to the FCC or FTC. Agency complaints do not start a lawsuit or pay you.
• It does not guarantee the calls stop, though a lawsuit and an order barring future calls often have that effect. Section 227(b)(3) allows a court to order a company to stop, in addition to damages.

Where to start with your own calls

If you know the company, gather your call records and ask for a free review. If you do not, the first job is identifying who is behind the calls. Either way, the most useful thing you can do today is start a dated log of every call and text, and keep it going until the calls stop.