California Sues Company For Violating Do Not Call List
from the state-enforcement? dept
Earlier this week, many folks misunderstood the FCC's announcement that they were fining AT&T for calling people who asked not to be called. Despite popular perception, that case was not about the national "do not call" list, but rather about AT&T's own internal "do not call" list, where people had explicitly told AT&T not to call them. Now, however, we may have the first real lawsuit filed concerning the national "do not call list" - but it's being filed by the California attorney general. I didn't know the specifics of the law, but I had been under the impression that the FTC (or the FCC) would be the enforcement arm. The article, though, explains that the FTC and FCC are simply compiling a list of the complaints, which are then available to law enforcement to take action on. However, the details are still a little off. It appears that there are various restrictions on who can sue who for how much - so that this lawsuit actually would have much lower levels of fines than the $11,000 per incident that has been talked about elsewhere.
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Don't call me, I'll call you
Both the $780k fine against AT&T and the California AG action are enforcement actions under the 10-year old telemarketing law known as TCPA. (The internal AT&T Do Not Call list isn't voluntary, it's mandated by the FCC.)
Section 227 of that law says that a state AG can bring a civil action on behalf of the state's residents to enjoin violations of the rules and to recover damages. Neat, huh? FCC & FTC are working on additional, national cases right now.
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About time...
These idiots at American Home have called me recently too, they called 7 times in the course of two hours, between 4pm and 6pm on one day. I am on the national do-not-call registry, but figured that enforcement would be version 2.0 of the law, to be added at a future date. Looks like I can start filing complaints now because California is looking after us (or more importantly, they have found a way to fix the budget at $100,000 a pop.)
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