In a field of law with many regulators at multiple levels imposing sometimes restrictive and sometimes redundant rules, the restrictions applicable to telemarketers when accepting a credit card payment over the telephone are surprisingly few and easy to implement for legitimate companies.
The FCC has proposed change to the TCPA which would bar all predictive dialed or prerecorded calls to cell lines without written signed consent of the recipient of the call.
TCPA class actions have not been allowed in the State of New York based on state law which prohibits class actions under statutes which provide for an individual monetary award for violations.
On April 5, 2010, Grant Degginger, with the Firm of Lane Powell PC, argued whether the TCPA preempts Washington’s state law with regard to prerecorded messages.
A federal judge has ruled that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) did not preempt Washington state law.
After a several month wait, a proposed revision to the TCPA, first distributed by the FCC in January, has been published in the Federal Register of March 22, 2010.
“Spoofing” occurs when a rogue company projects false or misleading caller identification information to either cause the legitimate owner of the phone number to have to respond to any regulatory inquiries or obscure the actual source of the call.
Complaints cause inquiries from regulators and inquiries, no matter if the business is totally legally compliant or not, are expensive and put a business in the defensive situation of having to rebut an assumption of guilt. When a regulator receives a complaint, he or she generally assumes the complaint to be true and leaves it to the business to rebut, at its own expense and peril, that complaint, even if compliance measures were in place.
There are many more exemptions from the TSR than those found in the text of the regulation itself. The new “ban”, then, may not apply to your calls and you should consult with your attorney before giving up the medium.
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