Araceli King of Irving, Texas received 153 calls to her cellphone from Time Warner Cable throughout the course of a year, only the calls weren’t meant for her and because TWC was using a robot to call she couldn’t tell them to cut it out. Finally she got through to an actual human being at Time Warner Cable to tell them the person they were trying to reach, Luiz Perez, no longer owned that phone number and that TWC was harassing her…the calls kept on coming. She then filed a lawsuit last year (March, 2014)…the calls kept on coming. Specifically, 74 robocalls from Time Warner Cable to her cell were placed AFTER she filed a lawsuit against them.
This gross negligence on the part of Time Warner Cable was ultimately what led a judge in Texas to award Araceli King $229,500 ($1,500 per call), after the judge perceived that TWC was not taking the lawsuit seriously.
Time Warner Cable Inc must pay the insurance claims specialist $229,500 for placing 153 automated calls meant for someone else to her cellphone in less than a year, even after she told it to stop, a Manhattan federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
King, of Irving, Texas, accused Time Warner Cable of harassing her by leaving messages for Luiz Perez, who once held her cellphone number, even after she made clear who she was in a seven-minute discussion with a company representative.
The calls were made through an “interactive voice response” system meant for customers who were late paying bills.
Time Warner Cable countered that it was not liable to King under the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, a law meant to curb robocall and telemarketing abuses, because it believed it was calling Perez, who had consented to the calls.
But in awarding triple damages of $1,500 per call for willfully violating that law, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein said “a responsible business” would have tried harder to find Perez and address the problem.
He also said 74 of the calls had been placed after King sued in March 2014, and that it was “incredible” to believe Time Warner Cable when it said it still did not know she objected.
“Defendant harassed plaintiff with robo-calls until she had to resort to a lawsuit to make the calls stop, and even then TWC could not be bothered to update the information in its IVR system,” Hellerstein wrote.
The last 74 calls, he added, were “particularly egregious violations of the TCPA and indicate that TWC simply did not take this lawsuit seriously.”
A trial had been scheduled for July 27. Time Warner Cable spokeswoman Susan Leepson said the New York-based company is reviewing the decision.
“Companies are using computers to dial phone numbers,” King’s lawyer Sergei Lemberg said in a phone interview. “They benefit from efficiency, but there is a cost when they make people’s lives miserable. This was one such case.”
I’m pretty sure I could endure a call every hour on the hour if it meant that I could see a massive pay day at the end. We Scotch-Irish have been known to bottle up all emotion for centuries on end, and I think I could channel that suppression of emotion if it meant a fat check for corporate harassment at the end of the tunnel.
Today is a GREAT DAY. Time Warner Cable is quite possibly the worst company I’ve ever dealt with in my life. My Internet goes out no less than once an hour. My Internet and Cable bill is somehow a different amount every single month even though I never rent on-demand movies. They’re corporate crooks. And today they’re being forced to own up to that, so like I said before, today is a good day.
[Reuters]