An individual who received 11 debt collection calls from a cable company that was attempting to reach someone else either wants an automatic victory or to have the suit certified as a class action, according to a pair of filings that were made in the case last week.
Joanne Knapper received the 11 calls from Cox Communications on her cell phone. Knapper was never a customer of Cox and never gave permission for the company to contact her. Cox was trying to reach someone else who had previously provided that phone number to the company.
Knapper filed a motion for summary judgment and a motion to have a class-action certified in the case last week. She is alleging that the defendant violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act in making the calls, and likely has done so to other individuals.
A copy of the summary judgment motion in Knapper v. Cox Communications can be accessed by clicking here. A copy of the class certification request can be accessed by clicking here.
In seeking summary judgment, the plaintiff alleges that the defendant violated the TCPA by using a pre-recorded voice when it called the plaintiff. The defendant also could not provide solid evidence documenting how it came to be in possession of the plaintiff’s phone number.
In seeking class certification, the plaintiff alleges that it has identified more than 600,000 cell phone numbers that are potential wrong numbers. The mere fact that there are potential wrong numbers, coupled with the fact that, at any given time, between 15% and 20% of the defendant’s customers are behind on their payments and likely receiving collection calls, is enough to certify that there are enough potential plaintiffs for a class action.
In other words, Defendant identified well over a half-million cellular telephone numbers, the subscribers to which Defendant likely had no relationship with whatsoever, as contact numbers for its customers. At the same time, Defendant made millions of autodialed calls per year to collect on residential accounts, of which 15-20 percent were delinquent during any given month.
