POSITIVE TREND: Courts Are Increasingly Pushing Back on Threadbare Prerecorded Call Allegations

Quick little insight for you TCPAWorld.

As I’ve been covering, the Courts have been depressingly lenient on plaintiffs filing ATDS cases post-Facebook. Some even suggest that threadbare ATDS allegations are sufficient. Weird and wrong.

But the TCPAWorld seems to be moving in the opposite direction on prerecorded calls.

For many years the courts allowed any old allegation of a prererecored voice call slip through past the pleadings stage. the logic, I guess, was that alleging you heard a prerecorded voice was factual enough, even though the allegations parroted the statute’s elements.

Well courts are starting to push back–and that’s a great sign given that the vast majority of current TCPA regulated-technology cases arise out of prerecorded voice calls.

For instance, in Smith v. American-Amicable Life Ins. Co. of Tex., CIVIL ACTION NO. 22-333, 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 62115 (E.D. Pa.  April 4, 2022) the court found that allegations of prerecorded calls and “spoofing” were just parroting the law. There we no facts alleged that actually made these claims plausible.

Incidentally, the court also held that the failure to allege a number is a residential number is fatal to a DNC claim.

Good stuff. Keep it in mind TCPAWorld!

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