Allegations that a defendant left identical messages in an “unnaturally perfect” voice were sufficient for a Washington federal court to deny a Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) defendant’s motion to dismiss.
Douglas Blair filed his TCPA class action after he allegedly received unlawful prerecorded telemarketing calls from CarInsurance.net. Blair claimed that he received six calls on December 23, 2022 that he did not answer and two more calls on December 26.
On the evening of December 26, Blair answered one of the calls and claimed that a prerecorded voice message identified the caller as CarInsurance.net and solicited the sale of car insurance.
He told the Court the call was prerecorded “because of the tone, cadence and timing of the speaker, which sounded unnaturally perfect.”
Blair continued to receive calls over the next several days, none of which he answered, although prerecorded voicemails were allegedly left on his phone on December 27, 28 and 30, which he said were “identical,” a fact he contended suggested that “all three were prerecorded.”
Assurance IQ – CarInsurance.net’s parent company named as the defendant in Blair’s complaint – filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that Blair’s complaint did not provide any basis for the Court to reasonably infer that the “voice” he allegedly heard was prerecorded as opposed to live.
But U.S. District Court Judge Kymberly K. Evanson disagreed.
Blair sufficiently alleged that the calls received on December 26, 27, 28 and 30 involved prerecorded voice messages in violation of Sections 227(b)(1)(A)(iii) and (b)(1)(B), the Court found.
Blair’s allegations about “[t]he voice’s ‘unnaturally perfect’ sound” was “enough at this stage for the Court to infer that it was artificial or prerecorded,” Judge Evanson wrote. Similarly, Judge Evanson concluded that Blair alleged facts sufficient to infer that the other three calls involved artificial or prerecorded voices because Blair alleged he “received all three calls at the same time (10:02 a.m.) and resulted in ‘identical’ voicemails delivering a generic sales pitch.”
The Court stated that, “To be sure, Blair could have expounded more on how these voicemails were identical (e.g., the tone and cadence of the voice).” Nevertheless, at the dismissal stage, viewing the facts in the light most favorable to the Plaintiff, the Court found that the “suspicious timing (three calls placed at the exact same time on three separate days) and generic content (identical, nonspecific sales pitches)” were “sufficient for the Court to reasonably infer that the speaker on the calls at issue was an artificial or prerecorded voice.”
The Court denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss.
However, the Court did toss Blair’s claims for treble damages and injunctive relief, finding that the plaintiff failed to allege the TCPA violations were willful or knowing or that he faced a threat of future harm.
To read the order in Blair v. Assurance IQ LLC, click here .
Why it matters: This case is yet another example of a court attempting to draw the line on the pleadings’ threshold for prerecorded and artificial voice call claims. Here, the Court found prerecorded call allegations sufficient based on the plaintiff’s allegations that the “tone, cadence and timing of the speaker, which sounded unnaturally perfect,” as well as the suspicious timing and generic content of the voicemails received.