Tag Archives: Do Not Call

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Two Texting Settlements, Two Different Mistakes: What Teleflora and Coast Dental Should Teach Every SMS Program

October brought two TCPA texting settlements worth studying side by side. One company allegedly texted people on the National Do Not Call Registry who never gave it their number. The other allegedly kept texting people after they replied STOP. Different failures, same result: a class action and a settlement fund in the millions.

Teleflora: $6 million over promotional texts to DNC numbers

In Carter v. Teleflora LLC, Case No. 2026-012979-CA-01, in the Circuit Court of Miami-Dade County, Florida, Teleflora agreed to pay $6 million to settle claims that it sent telemarketing texts without consent and without checking the National Do Not Call Registry. The plaintiff says she received multiple texts even though she never gave Teleflora her number. Teleflora denies wrongdoing.

The class covers people who never gave Teleflora their phone number, received more than one promotional text within a 12-month period starting May 9, 2021, and whose number had been on the National DNC Registry for at least 30 days. The estimated payment is about $251 per class member. The settlement received preliminary approval on August 26, 2026; claims, opt-outs and objections are due November 17, and the final approval hearing is set for November 25.

Coast Dental: up to $3.84 million over texts after STOP

In Chaviano v. Coast Dental Services, LLC, filed in Florida on July 6, 2026, Coast Dental agreed to pay up to $3,840,664. The suit alleged that the company sent appointment-related marketing texts and calls after consumers asked it to stop, in violation of the TCPA and the Florida Telephone Solicitation Act.

The class, roughly 24,308 people, covers individuals who received more than one appointment reminder or scheduling text within a 12-month period after replying “stop” or a similar opt-out. Class members can choose a pro rata cash payment of up to $59 or a voucher of up to $99 toward an electronic toothbrush. Preliminary approval came August 31, the final approval hearing is December 9, and claims are due December 24, 2026.

The operator’s read

These are not exotic legal theories. They are basic process failures, and they are the kind that scale. One missing suppression step touches every message in a campaign, which is exactly what makes a case certifiable as a class.

Here is what to check on your own program this week:

  • DNC scrubbing for SMS. If you send promotional texts to numbers you did not collect directly with consent, run them against the National DNC Registry first. Teleflora’s class is defined by registry status.
  • STOP handling end to end. Test it. Reply STOP to your own short code and confirm every platform that can send to that number stops, including reminder and scheduling flows that marketing may not think of as marketing.
  • Know where every number came from. “Never gave us their number” is a hard fact pattern to defend.
  • Watch your Florida exposure. Both cases were filed in Florida, and Coast Dental’s included a state-law claim on top of the TCPA.

Add a litigator screen

Consent and suppression are the foundation. A litigator screen is the next layer. TCPALitigatorList.com lets outbound and SMS teams check numbers against known TCPA litigators before a send, pulling the contacts most likely to file out of a campaign before they ever receive a message. It works alongside DNC scrubbing and opt-out handling, not in place of them.

Don’t forget the paper trail

If one of these claims ever lands on your desk, the first questions will be simple: where did this number come from, what did the person agree to, and when did they opt out? Make sure your team can answer all three from records, not memory. Pull a random sample of numbers each month and try it. If you cannot reconstruct the history in a few minutes, a plaintiff’s lawyer will happily do it for you.

Bottom line

A texting program does not need a dramatic mistake to end up in a settlement. It needs one gap repeated across every message. Close the gaps before the volume does the damage.

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A Florida Judge Just Said Consumers Can’t Sue Over the National Do-Not-Call List. Don’t Celebrate Yet.

If you run an outbound floor, you have probably treated the National Do-Not-Call Registry as the one rule you never mess with. On September 24, 2026, a federal court in the Middle District of Florida said something that would have sounded impossible a few years ago: a consumer cannot privately sue under the TCPA for calls to a number on the national registry. The case is Internicola v. MortgagePros, LLC, No. 6:25-CV-01613, and it is the sharpest swing yet in a fall full of rulings that are hollowing out the TCPA’s do-not-call claims.

Before anyone rips the DNC scrub out of their dialer, read on. This is a single district court, the plaintiff has already asked the judge to reconsider, and plenty of exposure remains.

What happened

According to TCPAWorld’s write-up of the decision, plaintiff Daniel Internicola put his number on the National DNC Registry in 2008. In April 2025 he talked to MortgagePros about refinancing his mortgage. On July 1, 2025, he withdrew his consent to be contacted. Over the next ten days, MortgagePros allegedly called or texted him just over a dozen times.

MortgagePros moved to dismiss, arguing that Section 227(c)(5), the TCPA’s do-not-call private right of action, does not reach national registry claims at all. The court agreed.

The reasoning, in plain terms

Section 227(c)(5) lets people sue over violations of “regulations prescribed under this subsection.” The court tied that phrase to Section 227(c)(2), which ordered the FCC to finish its do-not-call rulemaking “[n]ot later than 9 months after December 20, 1991.” By that reading, the private right of action only covers rules prescribed by September 20, 1992.

The problem for plaintiffs: the 1992 rules did not create a national registry. They required telemarketers to keep their own internal do-not-call lists. The National DNC Registry came in 2003, after Congress passed the Do-Not-Call Implementation Act. So, the court concluded, there is no private right of action for national DNC claims. The court also agreed that texts are not “calls” under Section 227(c)(5), which TCPAWorld notes is a well-established position in Florida by now.

It is not just Florida

Six days later, on September 30, the Eastern District of Missouri dismissed DNC claims in Koeller v. Ox AppSec Security, Inc. on a different theory: cellphones are not “residential” telephones. Relying on Loper Bright and McLaughlin, the court declined to follow the FCC’s 2003 interpretation that swept cellphones into the residential subscriber category, writing that “updating the statute to extend coverage to cellphones is Congress’s job, not the courts.”

Stack those with the growing pile of “texts are not calls” decisions and you get a picture of DNC litigation that looks very different depending on which courthouse you are standing in.

What operators should actually do

  • Keep scrubbing. These are district court rulings. They bind nobody outside their own cases, and TCPAWorld reported on October 5 that California federal courts are still holding SMS counts as calls for DNC purposes. Your dialer does not know which district a lawsuit will be filed in.
  • Your internal DNC list matters more, not less. If the Internicola logic spreads, the 1992-era internal do-not-call obligations are exactly what it leaves standing. Honor opt-outs fast and log them.
  • Look at the facts. This case started with a consumer who withdrew consent and then allegedly got a dozen-plus contacts in ten days. Revocation handling is where the trouble began, and revocation rules are not going anywhere.
  • Remember the other statutes. Robocall and autodialer claims under Section 227(b) were not touched here, and state mini-TCPAs have their own private rights of action.

Screen the people who sue for a living

Rulings like these will change how plaintiffs plead, not whether they file. Serial filers adapt fast, and they will reach for state statutes, revocation theories and autodialer counts when DNC claims dry up. One of the simplest defenses is knowing who is on the other end of the line before you dial. TCPALitigatorList.com lets teams screen their call and text lists against known TCPA litigators, so the numbers most likely to turn into a demand letter never make it into the campaign.

The bottom line

Internicola is a big swing, and a motion for reconsideration is already pending. Treat it as a sign of where some courts are heading, not as a hall pass. The operators who stay out of court will be the ones who keep their consent records clean, honor stop requests quickly, and know their risk before the first ring.

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Checks Are Going Out in the Zales TCPA Settlement — Here’s the Operator Lesson Behind the Headlines

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.