Everyone who owns a phone knows the pain of automated spam calls from companies that we, quite frankly, could not care less about. We try to ignore them or even tell them off, but nothing seems to work to keep them away long term.
Or so we thought. One man has been taking this business extremely seriously, earning himself over $75k in winnings over various telemarking lawsuits.
When facing frequent spam calls, there’s often only one step you can take.
You’re urged to sign up for your country’s national Do Not Call Registry, or list, or whatever it is they have, which is supposed to prevent your number from being targeted by telemarketers.
Of course, that rarely is the case, with many companies still using illegal methods of contacting those on the list anyway.
Well, one man had enough of the calls and decided to take them to court.
Dan Graham is a Texas financial accountant who told his story to KXAN .
“I probably get, in any given day, 10 [calls] on average,” he said. “I counted one day…I got 24 that day.” He did sign up for the Do Not Call Registry, but continued receiving calls anyway, so he escalated the matter to the Better Business Bureau and Federal Trade Commission.
This is when he started finding pertinent details.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act states that marketers “must obtain prior express written consent before robocalling” potential customers. The FTC then says, “companies that illegally call numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry or place an illegal robocall can currently be fined up to $43,792 per call.”
So, Graham began filing lawsuits against every company that robocalled him.
To date, he’s filed around 50 lawsuits in small business court.
Most of his early attempts failed, but with some time and persistence, he started winning. His victories resulted in thousands of dollars in penalties for the offending companies and over $75k in winnings for himself.
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“If people knew how to push back and started doing so, we could make this kind of endless spam unaffordable for the people who do it,” he said.
He puts emphasis on it being a group effort, as he alone can’t stop this practice.
“The hope is that there’s enough of us who stand up, start pushing back, that it becomes more expensive for companies to negligently hire these telemarketers and participate in these telemarketing practices.”
h/t: Chron
