This month, settlement checks started landing in mailboxes for the Zales TCPA class action — up to $100 each, across roughly 75,000 phone numbers, out of a $7.54 million fund. It is a useful moment to look past the headline number, because the three biggest TCPA settlements making news right now each fail in a different, very preventable way. For operators, they read less like legal news and more like a punch list.
Three settlements, three distinct mistakes
Zales — $7.54M. The jeweler was sued for sending marketing texts to numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry. The class definition is the lesson: numbers registered on the DNC list for at least 30 days that then received at least two texts within a 12-month period. That is a pure list-hygiene failure — texting people who had told the government, in writing, to leave them alone.
Truist Bank — $4.1M. The bank settled claims it placed prerecorded calls about accounts to the wrong people — roughly 6,000 numbers that were not the account holders and had not consented to anything. The plaintiff alleged he got two dozen robocalls meant for someone else. That is a wrong-number and data-quality failure: calling reassigned or mistyped numbers without a process to catch them.
Everything Breaks — about $995K. The warranty company settled claims of repeated telemarketing robocalls to consumers on the National Do Not Call Registry. Same root cause as Zales, smaller company, smaller fund — proof the exposure is not just a big-brand problem.
The volume behind the settlements
None of this is happening in a vacuum. More TCPA class actions were filed in the first quarter of 2026 than in any quarter in recorded history. The plaintiffs’ bar has industrialized the work: intake, list analysis, demand letters, and class definitions are now a repeatable pipeline. When filing volume is at an all-time high, the question for an outbound operation is not whether your practices will be tested but when.
The operator punch list
Scrub every outbound list against the National Do Not Call Registry on a fresh cycle — not a download from last quarter — and keep your internal do-not-call suppression synchronized across every system and brand. Build reassigned-number checking into your dialing so you stop calling numbers that changed hands; the FCC’s Reassigned Numbers Database exists for exactly this. Treat a wrong-number complaint as a stop signal, not a data-entry note. And keep consent and suppression records you can actually produce, because in every one of these cases the company’s inability to prove a clean practice is what turned a complaint into a fund.
For operators, the cheapest line of defense is also the most overlooked: scrub your call and text lists before you dial. TCPALitigatorList.com maintains the most widely used database of known TCPA plaintiffs and serial filers. Running an outbound list through it takes minutes and keeps professional litigants off your campaigns before they ever pick up the phone — which, given how fast statutory damages add up, is one of the highest-return compliance steps an operator can build into a launch checklist.
The takeaway
Zales, Truist, and Everything Breaks did not lose to exotic legal theories. They lost to stale lists, wrong numbers, and opt-outs that did not propagate. Those are operational problems with operational fixes — and in a record-setting filing environment, fixing them is cheaper than funding the next settlement.
Sources
Top Class Actions — “$7.54M Zales TCPA class action settlement”; Class Action.org — “$4.1M Truist Bank Settlement”; CompliancePoint — “Truist Bank Settles $4.1M TCPA Lawsuit”; Top Class Actions — “Everything Breaks $995,000 TCPA settlement”; CompliancePoint / Shipkevich PLLC — 2026 TCPA litigation trend reporting.