Thanks to Eric Troutman at TCPAWorld.com for noticing this first … A collector that appealed a $267 million ruling against it in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act case has notified the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that it has reached a settlement with the plaintiff.
Details of the settlement were not disclosed in the filing in the case of Perez v. Rash Curtis & Associates, which can be accessed by clicking here.
Oral arguments in the case were scheduled to be heard before the Ninth Circuit later this month, but the parties informed the Court in the days leading up to the hearing that a settlement had been reached and subsequently executed. The parties then moved to remand the case back to the District Court to approve a proposed distribution to the class based on the terms of the settlement.
Back in 2019, a jury found the defendant guilty of making more than 500,000 calls in violation of the TCPA. There were four classes of individuals — two involving those who received skiptracing-related calls or pre-recorded messages and two involving individuals who were not debtors and not being sought after by the defendant for collection but received calls on their cell phones or pre-recorded messages.
This case had previously made headlines following a ruling from a judge that deemed the filing of a lawsuit against a collection agency was sufficient to indicate that consent to be contacted had been revoked and the defendant should have used the suit as such.
The defendant was attempting to argue that rulings in a pair of other cases — Creasy v. Charter Communications and Lindenbaum v. Realgy, LLC rendered the TCPA unconstitutional between 2015 and 2020 — when an amendment to the statute was added allowing an exception to the use of ATDS’s when contacting individuals on their cell phones — without first obtaining prior consent — to collect on debts that were owed to, or guaranteed by, the federal government. That exemption was struck down by the Supreme Court in Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants. But now, three courts have ruled that the Supreme Court’s decision in Barr renders the entire TCPA unconstitutional during that five-year period.
