A federal judge in New Jersey has denied a motion to dismiss a lawsuit alleging a company violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by placing debt collection calls to an individual on her mobile phone without her consenting to be contacted.
A copy of the ruling in Wilson v. Quest Diagnostics Inc. can be accessed by clicking here.
The plaintiff alleges she received a phone call on her mobile phone. When she picked up the phone, there was a momentary pause before a representative from the defendant started speaking and said the purpose of the call was to collect a debt from someone other than the plaintiff. The plaintiff had never received a call from the defendant prior to this one and had not consented to being contacted by the defendant on her mobile phone, she alleges.
In denying the motion to dismiss, the judge looked at rulings in ACA International v. FCC and Dominguez v. Yahoo, Inc., and ruled that neither of those cases “made no proclamation declaring the prior FCC Orders invalid.”
The Third Circuit’s ruling in Dominguez did not invalidate orders from the Federal Communications Commission that were issued in 2003 and 2008, which qualified a predictive dialer — such as the one possibly used to contact the plaintiff — as an automatic telephone dialing system. In ACA, the court only struck down the expanded order issued by the FCC and did not “endorse one interpretation over the other, even implicitly,” wrote Judge William Martini.
Quest cited a number of cases in which it was ruled that a predictive dialer is not an ATDS, but those cases were decided at the summary judgment phase “meaning the court had the benefit of a fully developed record showing the types of devices used to contact plaintiffs.”
