Tag Archives: settlement

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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.

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TCPA Settlements Are Climbing — and One Class Just Hit $3,787 a Person

If anyone in your company still views TCPA suits as a cost-of-doing-business nuisance, April 2026 is the wake-up call. A wave of new settlements and filings has reset the math on what individual plaintiffs can recover — and what defendants are paying to make the suits go away.

The $3,787 headline

In a TCPA settlement that closed earlier this month, individual class members received $3,787 each — far above typical TCPA per-claimant payouts in the $20-to-$200 range. The unusually small claimant pool, combined with a generous fund, produced a per-person windfall that is now being cited in plaintiffs’ demand letters across the country.

The other April 2026 settlements

The headline payout is not an outlier in dollar terms. Recent and pending TCPA settlements include a $9.95M Gen Digital (LifeLock/Norton) prerecorded-message settlement (claim deadline April 13, 2026), a $1.32M ASP Aesthetics settlement for marketing texts sent after opt-out, and a $5.975M Wilshire Law Firm prerecorded-message settlement. Nationwide pet insurance settled a robocall class for $1.4M, with claims due in March.

The new front: quiet-hours lawsuits

Plaintiffs’ lawyers have also opened a new theory: TCPA “quiet hours” violations. The TCPA prohibits marketing calls before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. local time. New filings, including a class action against Ruggable, target marketers whose SMS campaigns sent before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. The cases are simple to plead — anyone who got more than one out-of-hours marketing text in 12 months can be a class member — and they put time-zone management at the center of compliance.

What a typical defendant did wrong

Across these cases, the patterns are familiar: outdated suppression files, time-zone bugs that fired SMS at the recipient’s home time rather than the carrier’s, third-party vendors with looser consent practices, and lists never scrubbed against known-litigator databases.

Before your sales or marketing team places its next outbound call or text, run the recipient list through TCPALitigatorList.com. It is the largest curated database of known TCPA litigators and serial-suers in the United States, and a single scrub against it can keep one mistaken contact from turning into a five- or six-figure demand letter. Most of the defendants in the cases above were dialing or texting numbers they could have flagged in seconds.

Three controls that prevent most of this

First, anchor send times to the recipient’s actual local time, not your CRM’s server time. Second, run STOP and DNC scrubs immediately before send, not weekly or monthly. Third, scrub against known TCPA litigator lists before any campaign — most of the named plaintiffs in 2026’s biggest settlements have been suing for years and were not hard to identify.