TCPA - The best way to revoke your consent to get robocalls

Probably THE hot area in consumer law right now is the TCPA, the Telephone Consumer Privacy Act.  Among other things, the TCPA prohibits auto-dialed calls to personal cell phones for commercial purposes without prior written consent, and each call that violates the TCPA can bring damages of $500-1500.

One of the thorniest issues involves consent and revoking consent. Many times people give consent in boilerplate contracts, paper or online clickboxes, often without realizing it.  It is clear, however, that once you give consent, you can revoke it. Per FTC guidelines, you can revoke consent orally or in writing in any reasonable manner.

When people are getting calls I generally recommend that they first revoke consent orally, with some prof that they did it, for example by recording your call where you revoke consent. (Technically you can always record a call if you live in a "single party consent state". If you live in one of the few dual party consent states, recording the call may violate a wiretapping statute.) Another option is to put the call on speaker phone and have a witness listen to you call revoking consent and make "contemporaneous notes".  I've never actually had anyone do this though.

What do you say to revoke consent? "Don't call me anymore."  If you want to get technical, "I hereby revoke my consent for you to call me."

After revoking consent orally on the phone, I urge people to write to the company calling and  revoke it in writing.  The challenge sometimes is to find the right address to write. There are cases where  consumers  thought they were revoking, but because the letter didn't get to the right subentity, they lost their case.  For example, the consumer who sued Target card, which was owned by TD Bank, but the consumer faxed their revocation to the wrong departments at TD Bank.  As a general rule, you can send your revocation to the address given on a statement for correspondence. I personally believe that you can send your revocation to the registered agent of a corporation in your state, IF the corporation whose agent you are sending it to is the same corporation that is calling you.  This is one that I haven't tested out yet.  Oral revocation followed by revocation by certified mail to registered agent has a lot of promise for maximizing damages, however. After oral revocation is ignored, the calls after oral revocation stand a good chance of qualifying for maximum damage of $1,500 per call for willful violations. The delay in communications received by the registered agent to the operating office of the company will generally result in calls that are received afte

If you are an Indiana resident who is receiving robocalls to your cell phone, or if you are receiving unsolicited fax advertisements (another TCPA violation), I urge you to call me at 317-662-4529. There is another major area of prohibition under the TCPA, telemarketing calls to home telephones on the do-not-call list. Unfortunately, these days, those calls tend to be placed by scammers that have carefully insulated themselves from lawsuits, and in my experience, not even 1 out of 100 of these calls can be practically sued upon.