Tag Archives: TCPA

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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 Judge Just Made a Serial TCPA Plaintiff Pay for His Own Setup. Here’s What Outbound Operators Should Take From It.

If you run an outbound floor long enough, you meet him eventually: the consumer who seems to want your call, picks up, plays along, and then shows up as the named plaintiff in a TCPA complaint. Most operators treat that as a cost of doing business. On September 30, 2026, a federal judge in Missouri treated it as fraud.

In Human v. Fisher Investments, Inc., No. 4:24-cv-01177-MTS (E.D. Mo.), Judge Matthew T. Schelp found that the lawsuit was brought “in complete bad faith” and that “the genesis of this entire action was Human’s fraud.” The court ordered that Fisher Investments can recover all of its reasonable attorney’s fees for defending against the TCPA claims, from the start of the case. The plaintiff, his attorney Edwin Butler, and Butler Law Group LLC are jointly and severally liable for the full award.

What the court found

According to reporting on the order, the court found that Daniel Human gave his phone number under a fake name to request solicitations, so that he could sue under the TCPA once Fisher called. The court described this as his “practice,” and noted that dozens of prior defendants had settled similar claims.

The discovery record made it worse. The court found that Human destroyed his desktop computer two days before a court-ordered inspection and brought a decoy laptop instead. The court had previously struck Human’s pleadings. It also found that his lawyer knew the claims were not legitimate when he entered the case, and it did not credit the lawyer’s testimony.

The fee award covers the defense of Human’s claims. Fees tied to Fisher’s own fraud counterclaim are carved out of the blanket award, though Fisher can seek separate sanctions for specific misconduct. Fisher’s fee records are due October 22, 2026, with oppositions and replies to follow.

Why operators should not relax

It is tempting to read this as the system finally catching up with professional plaintiffs. Be careful with that conclusion. Look at what it took. The case was filed in 2024. Fisher had to push for a forensic inspection, fight through discovery, prove the setup, and then win sanctions. That is a defense budget most outbound businesses do not have for a single plaintiff.

The other detail that matters is the one that sounds most ordinary: dozens of prior defendants settled. Each of those companies made a rational decision. Paying a settlement was cheaper than finding out what Fisher found out. That is the business model a serial filer depends on, and one sanctions order does not end it.

What to change on the floor

The practical lesson is to stop meeting these plaintiffs in the first place. A few habits help:

  • Treat consent records as evidence. Capture the form, the timestamp, the IP and the exact language the person agreed to. Fisher’s case turned on proving how the number entered its system.
  • Watch for mismatches. A name that does not match the number’s history, or a lead that converts suspiciously well and then goes quiet, deserves a second look before the second call.
  • Keep your own data. Call logs, dispositions and recordings are what let you show a court what actually happened.
  • Screen before you dial. The cheapest dispute is the call that never went out.

That last point is where a litigator screen earns its keep. TCPALitigatorList.com helps outbound teams check numbers against known TCPA litigators and serial filers before a campaign goes live, so the contacts most likely to turn into a complaint are pulled out of the list upstream rather than discovered in a demand letter.

The bottom line

Courts will occasionally punish a manufactured TCPA claim, and Human v. Fisher shows they can do it forcefully. But a fee award at the end of a long case is a remedy, not a strategy. For an outbound operator, the strategy is clean consent, good records and a list that has already been scrubbed of the people who sue for a living.

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Florida’s AG Wants STOP to Mean Stop, Faster. Outbound Teams Should Get Ready Now.

Florida already has one of the toughest telemarketing laws in the country. Its Attorney General wants to make it tougher. On September 17, 2026, Attorney General James Uthmeier proposed the Florida Anti-Spam Communications Act, a package that would hand his office independent authority to go after spam calls and texts, put new duties on phone carriers and, most relevant to legitimate outbound teams, shorten the time businesses have to honor a STOP request.

No bill text or bill number had surfaced as of late September, so the details could change a lot. But the direction is clear, and if you call or text Florida numbers, it is worth planning for.

What’s in the proposal

Based on the announcement as reported by Spectrum News, WCTV and TCPAWorld, the proposal would:

  • Give the Department of Legal Affairs independent authority to investigate spam calls and texts and seek injunctions, restitution and civil penalties.
  • Target impersonation of officials, caller ID spoofing, undisclosed AI voices used to get money, and fake warrants sent by text or email.
  • Make high-volume or high-loss schemes heightened felonies with mandatory prison time.
  • Make it a felony to possess or import phone farms or SIM farms, and treat that equipment as contraband.
  • Require communications providers to authenticate caller ID, answer traceback requests and stop carrying a named unlawful campaign after written notice.
  • Make selling stolen lists used to target Florida numbers a separate civil violation.
  • Tighten Florida’s telemarketing consent law and require STOP requests to be honored “within days instead of weeks.”

Uthmeier did not soften the message. “You need to go to jail for four or five years if you’re engaging in this kind of sophisticated fraud,” he said, according to WCTV.

Why legit operators should care

Most of this package is aimed squarely at scammers: fake deputies, spoofed toll agencies, SIM farms. You are not running a SIM farm. But two pieces land on everyone.

First, the opt-out clock. Under the current Florida Telephone Solicitation Act, a text-message damages claim generally depends on the consumer replying STOP and the sender continuing to text 15 days after that notice, as TCPAWorld points out, citing Fla. Stat. 501.059(10)(c). Federally, the TCPA requires revocations to be honored within a reasonable time, not to exceed ten business days. “Within days instead of weeks” suggests Florida wants something shorter. TCPAWorld also notes that a faster opt-out duty would not automatically change when a plaintiff can sue. That depends on the final text.

Second, carrier cutoffs. If providers must kill a “named unlawful campaign” after written notice from the state, your traffic’s fate could depend on how carriers identify covered messages. TCPAWorld flags that the response deadline and any process for challenging a mistaken notice are still unknown. A legitimate campaign caught in a sweep is a real business risk.

What to do this quarter

  • Audit your opt-out latency. Measure the time from STOP to suppression across every tool. If it is measured in days, fix it now. Aim for near real time.
  • Clean up caller ID. Make sure your numbers are properly registered and authenticated with your carriers.
  • Know your data sources. The stolen-list provision is a reminder to document where every lead came from.
  • Watch Tallahassee. The actual bill language will decide everything.

Cut the riskiest numbers before you dial

Florida’s FTSA already gives consumers a private right of action, and tighter state rules tend to give plaintiffs new theories to plead. One fast way to cut exposure is to remove the people who sue for a living from your lists before a campaign launches. TCPALitigatorList.com lets teams screen numbers against known TCPA litigators, so a tighter STOP window does not become an expensive surprise.

Bottom line

This is a proposal, not a law. But state AGs set the tone for enforcement, and Florida’s is telling the market that speed on opt-outs and clean caller ID are table stakes. Build for that now and the final bill will be an update, not an emergency.

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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.

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There’s a New TCPA Lawsuit Going Around — and It’s About What Shows Up on the Screen

Operators have spent two years bracing for the obvious TCPA traps: consent, quiet hours, do-not-call scrubbing. Here is the one most teams have not even put on the board. Plaintiffs’ lawyers have found a new claim, and it has nothing to do with whether the recipient consented. It is about what your call or text actually displayed on the recipient’s phone — the caller ID — and a string of 2026 rulings just confirmed consumers can sue over it.

The rule nobody was watching

Buried in the FCC’s telemarketing regulations, 47 C.F.R. 64.1601(e) requires telemarketers to transmit caller identification information — a name and a number a consumer can call back to make a do-not-call request. For years this was treated as a technical rule enforced, if at all, by regulators. In 2026 that changed. Multiple federal courts have now held that consumers have a private right of action to sue over caller ID failures, and that the requirement applies not just to voice calls but to marketing text messages.

What the recent cases show

The picture is genuinely mixed, which is exactly why it is dangerous. In Zelma v. Ram, decided in the District of New Jersey on May 19, 2026, the court gave defendants something to like: displaying the recognizable brand name “RE/MAX” next to the number was enough to satisfy the caller ID requirement. But in Novia v. Mobiz, a Massachusetts federal court let a caller ID claim over marketing texts survive the pleading stage, and a second court has now recognized a private right of action for SMS caller ID failures. Translation: a defective sender ID on a text blast is now a viable class claim, and the safe-harbor line — what counts as adequate identification — is still being drawn case by case.

Why this hits operators hard

Most outbound text programs were never built with this rule in mind. Short codes, rotating 10DLC numbers, alphanumeric sender IDs, and “no-reply” configurations are everywhere — and several of those setups arguably fail to give the consumer a name plus a callable number for do-not-call requests. Because TCPA damages run $500 to $1,500 per message, a single campaign sent from a non-compliant sender ID to a large list is a ready-made class action, even if every recipient opted in. Consent does not cure a caller ID defect.

What to do this week

Pull up your last five outbound campaigns on an actual phone and look at what displays. Does the recipient see an identifiable business name? Is there a number they can call back — one that is monitored — to ask not to be contacted? For voice, confirm your transmitted CNAM and ANI resolve to your business, not a blank or a spoofed-looking string. For texts, make sure the sender identity and the opt-out path are unambiguous. And watch the states: Florida’s 2026 legislature is weighing strict caller identification mandates that would go further than the federal rule.

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

The caller ID claim is attractive to plaintiffs precisely because it sidesteps the hardest part of a TCPA case — proving lack of consent — and turns instead on a technical display detail the defendant either got right or did not. Get it right before a plaintiff checks it for you.

Sources

Zelma v. Ram, 2026 WL 1398784 (D.N.J. May 19, 2026); National Law Review — “MAX TCPA Clarity”; Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney — “Calling for Clarity: Navigating New Caller ID TCPA Claims”; Bubeck Law — “A New TCPA Risk: Caller ID Requirements for Marketing Texts?”; 47 C.F.R. 64.1601(e).

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A Federal Court Just Drew a Cleaner Line Between You and Your Lead Vendors

If you run outbound calling or texting and you buy leads, hire a dialing vendor, or work through affiliates, here is a ruling worth pinning to the wall. On May 15, 2026, a federal judge in the Western District of Washington threw out TCPA claims against two insurance companies in Sundstrom v. Ocean Reef Media LLC, finding the plaintiff never plausibly explained why those insurers should answer for calls a different company allegedly placed. For operators, that is a rare piece of good news — and a clear roadmap for how to keep yourself out of the same complaint.

What happened

The plaintiff received marketing calls and sued not just the entity that dialed, but the insurers whose products were ultimately being pitched. The theory was vicarious liability: hold the brand at the end of the funnel responsible for the conduct of the lead generator at the front of it. The court was not persuaded. It dismissed the claims against the insurers because the complaint offered conclusions — “they were agents,” “they authorized this” — without the concrete facts a court needs to make that link plausible. Speculative inferences, the judge held, are not enough.

Why operators should care

TCPA liability has never stopped at the company that physically pressed “send.” Under the FCC’s long-standing agency framework, a brand can be on the hook for a vendor’s or affiliate’s calls if it controlled the manner and means of those calls, ratified them, or cloaked the caller in apparent authority. That is exactly how a plaintiff’s lawyer tries to reach the deeper pockets. Sundstrom does not erase that exposure. What it does is confirm that a plaintiff has to actually plead the relationship — who directed whom, what the contract said, who set the script, who controlled the lists — and cannot simply name every company in the chain and hope discovery fills the gap.

That cuts both ways. It is a defense win if your paperwork and your day-to-day practice genuinely keep you at arm’s length from a vendor. It is a loaded gun pointed at you if they do not, because the same facts that defeat a vague complaint will sink a well-pleaded one.

The operator checklist

Treat Sundstrom as a prompt to audit how much control you exert over the people dialing on your behalf. Read your vendor contracts: do they assign TCPA compliance, consent capture, and list scrubbing to the vendor in writing, with indemnification? Look at practice, not just paper — if your team writes the scripts, approves the call windows, hands over the lists, and monitors the dialer, a court will see an agency relationship no matter what the contract title says. Keep consent records that travel with the lead, so you can show where a phone number came from and what the consumer actually agreed to. And require proof, not promises, that your partners are scrubbing against do-not-call data and known litigants before any campaign goes out.

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

The win in Sundstrom went to defendants who could not be plausibly tied to the calls. The lesson for everyone else is that the tie is built — or avoided — long before a complaint is filed. Tighten your vendor governance now, and a future plaintiff will have nothing concrete to plead. Leave it loose, and the next court may have plenty.

Sources

Faegre Drinker — “Washington Federal Court Dismisses TCPA Claims, Finding Insufficient Allegations of Vicarious Liability”; Sundstrom v. Ocean Reef Media LLC, No. 26-5036, 2026 WL 1361646 (W.D. Wash. May 15, 2026).

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If a Plaintiff Can Sue OpenAI for Their Customer’s Texts, Every Outbound Operator Should Be Paying Attention

There’s a TCPA complaint sitting in a Virginia federal court that should be on every outbound operator’s radar — not because of the consumer who filed it, but because of who he sued.

In Lowry v. OpenAI, the plaintiff alleges he received unwanted marketing text messages from a company called Fresh Start Group, sent via Twilio-provisioned numbers, that were generated using OpenAI’s platform. So far, so unremarkable. The unusual move is that the complaint names OpenAI itself and Twilio as defendants — not just the company that actually sent the messages.

The platform liability theory

The theory: under the TCPA, you can be liable if you ’cause’ a call or text to be initiated — not just if you physically dial. The complaint argues that by providing the AI platform that generated the messages and the telephony infrastructure that delivered them, OpenAI and Twilio caused the messages and should share liability with the downstream caller.

If that theory survives — and even if it only survives early motions long enough to drive a settlement — it reshapes the TCPA risk model for every operator that uses an AI agent or a CPaaS provider in their outbound stack. Which, in 2026, is basically all of them.

The exposure math

The complaint seeks to represent a class of every U.S. consumer who received marketing messages generated on OpenAI’s platform, where the recipient’s number was on the DNC list and OpenAI did not have consent. At $500 per call with a four-year TCPA lookback, the theoretical class damages run into the trillions. That number is obviously aspirational, but it is the number plaintiff’s counsel will use at the settlement table.

Twilio is not new to this argument. The company received an FCC cease-and-desist letter in 2024 over allegedly enabling illegal robocall traffic. The platform-liability theory in Lowry didn’t appear from nowhere — it’s the legal extension of years of regulatory pressure on the infrastructure layer.

Why this matters even if you’re not Twilio or OpenAI

For operators, the practical implication is not ‘we should stop using AI or CPaaS providers.’ The implication is that the indemnity and consent structure of your vendor agreements just got a lot more important. If your CPaaS or AI vendor takes a settlement-driven hit from a Lowry-style case, every contract clause about pass-through liability, indemnity, and audit rights becomes live.

Three operator action items:

1. Read your CPaaS terms of service. Most CPaaS providers explicitly disclaim TCPA liability and push it back to the customer. That’s fine until a court holds the CPaaS provider liable anyway — at which point the disclaimer becomes a contract fight, not a liability shield.

2. Document your consent-to-platform chain. If a platform-liability case lands and the platform comes asking, you want a clean record of how every number on your campaign ended up there with consent.

3. Watch the FCC’s posture. The FCC has already issued cease-and-desist letters to infrastructure providers and has ruled that AI-generated voices are ‘artificial or prerecorded voice’ under the TCPA. The trend is toward more, not less, liability up the stack.

If you run an outbound calling or texting program, the cheapest insurance against any of this is screening your dial list before you hit send. TCPALitigatorList.com maintains a continuously updated database of known TCPA plaintiffs and serial litigators so operators can scrub their files and quietly remove the numbers most likely to turn a routine campaign into a class action. A few minutes of list hygiene beats a few months of discovery every time.

The bigger arc

The TCPA was written in 1991 for a world of human dialers calling from cubicles. The legal system has spent 35 years stretching its concepts of ‘call,’ ‘caller,’ and ‘consent’ to cover autodialers, prerecorded voice, ringless voicemail, SMS, and now AI-generated messages routed through stack-of-stack platforms.

Lowry v. OpenAI is the next chapter of that stretch: holding whoever provided the technology that caused the message, not just the entity whose name was on the customer-facing brand. Watch this case closely. Whether it wins or settles, it will move where TCPA liability lands for the next decade.

Sources

National Law Review: New TCPA Complaint Names OpenAI and Twilio
Henson Legal: OpenAI and Twilio Sued for Customers’ TCPA Violations
Lowry v. OpenAI Complaint (PDF)

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Ringless Voicemail Isn’t a Loophole Anymore — Two 2026 Cases Are Sending That Message Loud and Clear

For years, ringless voicemail (RVM) vendors sold the same comforting story to operators: drop a message straight into a consumer’s voicemail without actually placing a call, and you sidestep the TCPA. That story is dead. Two 2026 cases have driven a stake through it, and any operator still running RVM campaigns without TCPA-grade consent is sitting on an unsexploded class action.

The $6.5M warning shot

National Retail Solutions (NRS), a point-of-sale technology provider, agreed to pay over $6.5 million to resolve a TCPA class action alleging it used ringless voicemail technology without the level of consent the statute requires. The class is limited to RVMs sent by a single provider, with over 50,000 class members each set to receive more than $100. The ceiling on what NRS sent is almost certainly much higher than the class that got certified.

The case is a clean operator-side cautionary tale. NRS wasn’t a fly-by-night dialer shop. It was a B2B technology company that ran a growth program through a marketing channel its leadership probably believed was compliant. The compliance belief was wrong, the scale was high, and the bill is $6.5M.

The GoHighLevel realtor case

The second case to know is the Britney Gaitan / GoHighLevel matter out of Las Vegas. A solo realtor used GoHighLevel — a popular all-in-one marketing platform — to send ringless voicemails to expired listings. A court certified a class against her on the theory that the voicemails were prerecorded calls under the TCPA, and that she had no documentation of consent from class members.

The operator-level lesson here is brutal. You don’t need to be a Fortune 500 telemarketer to face TCPA class exposure. You need to run a single high-volume RVM campaign without consent records, and you can lose your business.

Why courts keep treating RVM as TCPA-regulated

The FCC settled this question in 2022 with a Declaratory Ruling that ringless voicemails to wireless phones are subject to the TCPA’s robocall provisions because they are calls made using an artificial or prerecorded voice. Every court ruling since has reinforced that position, including a 2025 decision in Taylor v. Kit Insurance holding that identical voicemail content is enough at the pleading stage to allege a prerecorded call.

The vendor story — that RVMs aren’t ‘calls’ because they bypass the ring — has been rejected by the FCC and the courts. If your vendor is still pitching that line, find a new vendor.

Operator checklist if you run RVM

Treat RVM exactly like a robocall. Same prior express written consent. Same DNC scrubbing. Same revocation handling. Same recordkeeping. There is no separate compliance lane.

Audit your consent records by source. If you can’t produce, per number, a time-stamped, source-traceable consent record for the specific channel and specific purpose, you don’t have consent.

Get rid of legacy lists. Old lead lists are where TCPA class actions are born. If a list pre-dates your current consent process, retire it.

Document your platform’s defaults. Many marketing platforms ship with consent assumptions baked in. If those assumptions don’t match your actual lead flow, you’re carrying the risk, not the platform.

If you run an outbound calling or texting program, the cheapest insurance against any of this is screening your dial list before you hit send. TCPALitigatorList.com maintains a continuously updated database of known TCPA plaintiffs and serial litigators so operators can scrub their files and quietly remove the numbers most likely to turn a routine campaign into a class action. A few minutes of list hygiene beats a few months of discovery every time.

Bottom line

The RVM industry spent a decade selling a workaround that the FCC and the courts have now explicitly rejected. Operators who continue to rely on the workaround are betting against settled regulatory and judicial positions. The NRS $6.5M settlement and the GoHighLevel class certification are the two numbers that should end the bet.

Sources

National Law Review: Ringless Voicemail Triggers $6.5M TCPA Settlement for NRS
TCPAWorld: GoHighLevel Realtor TCPA Class Action
FCC Declaratory Ruling on Ringless Voicemail

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Tennessee Just Quietly Rewrote the Rules for Automated Calling — Here’s What Operators Need to Do Before July 1

If you run outbound calling or texting programs that touch Tennessee residents, mark a date on your wall: July 1, 2026. That’s when Tennessee’s new automated-telemarketing oversight law — HB 2408 / SB 2659 — takes effect, and it’s going to change the day-to-day mechanics of how you operate in the state.

The bill cleared both chambers without a single dissenting vote (94-0 in the House on April 6, 33-0 in the Senate on April 21), was signed by the Speaker on April 30, and was transmitted to Governor Lee on May 7. If he signs it — and there’s no political reason to think he won’t — the amendment applies to conduct occurring on or after July 1, 2026.

What actually changed

The bill amends Tennessee’s existing telephone and text-message solicitation framework by bolting on a new oversight mechanism aimed squarely at large-scale automated campaigns. The headline practical changes are new reporting requirements, expanded recordkeeping obligations, and tighter solicitation limits for any business running automated dialers or mass-text platforms into Tennessee numbers.

The key word is oversight. Tennessee already has TCPA-style consent and DNC rules on the books. What was missing was visibility — the state regulator had no clean way to see who was running large automated campaigns into the state. The amendment fixes that by requiring covered callers to file reports and retain records that the regulator can pull on demand.

Why this matters operationally

The federal TCPA gets the attention, but state-level enforcement is where most operators actually get caught. State regulators have shorter ramps to enforcement, can act on a complaint without a class plaintiff, and increasingly coordinate with sister states under the 51-AG Anti-Robocall Task Force. Tennessee adding a reporting regime is a textbook case of the state-level squeeze that’s been building all year.

For operators, the practical to-do list before July 1 is short but real:

1. Inventory your Tennessee traffic. Pull the last 12 months of dialer and SMS logs and segment by state. If Tennessee is a meaningful slice, you are in scope.

2. Audit your consent records. The reporting regime won’t be friendly to operators who can’t produce a clean, time-stamped consent record for each number. Now is the time to fix gaps in lead documentation.

3. Pin down your vendor stack. If you use third-party dialers, SMS aggregators, or lead vendors, your recordkeeping is only as good as theirs. Get contractual commitments in writing that they’ll preserve and produce records on the timelines the new law demands.

4. Rethink your suppression process. Reporting obligations mean every preventable violation becomes a visible one. Front-loading suppression — DNC scrubs, internal-DNC propagation, litigator screening — is the cheapest risk reduction you can do.

If you run an outbound calling or texting program, the cheapest insurance against any of this is screening your dial list before you hit send. TCPALitigatorList.com maintains a continuously updated database of known TCPA plaintiffs and serial litigators so operators can scrub their files and quietly remove the numbers most likely to turn a routine campaign into a class action. A few minutes of list hygiene beats a few months of discovery every time.

The bigger picture

Tennessee is not an outlier. New York raised its DNC fine ceiling to $20,000 per violation. Mississippi shifted its no-call enforcement to the AG. The pattern is clear: while the FCC is loosening at the federal level, states are tightening, and the tightening comes with real teeth.

Operators who treat TCPA compliance as a single federal program are going to keep getting surprised. The compliance map is now a 50-state patchwork, and Tennessee just added another patch with a deadline.

Sources

TCPAWorld: Tennessee’s New Solicitation Oversight Law
Receivables Info: Tennessee Legislature Approves New Automated Telemarketing Restrictions
LegiScan: Tennessee HB 2408