A woman who was constantly receiving unwanted robocalls from Time Warner Cable fought back and won big. A judge has ordered the company to pay her a whopping $229,500 for harassing her with 153 automated calls in a one-year period.
There's one thing consumers hate more than calling the customer service division of a company they deal with only to find a complicated automated system on the other end of the line, and that's when an automated system actually calls them. Robocalls are among the most irritating offshoots of the technology evolution, and that's why laws were enacted to prevent the abuse of these systems, which theoretically can contact users' phones as often as they choose.
One frustrated consumer, Araceli King, decided to fight back, and what a lucrative decision it turned out to be, as a judge has just ruled that Time Warner Cable has to pay her $229,500 in damages.
It all started when King began receiving phone calls from Time Warner Cable claiming that she was late in paying her bill. Problem was, the company was actually attempting to reach one Luis Perez, who just happened to be the previous owner of King's current cell phone number. Even after repeated attempts by King to correct the mistake, including a seven-minute-long conversation with a TWC rep, her phone kept ringing a total of 153 times in a one-year period.
TWC argued in the case, King vs. Time Warner Cable, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 14-02018, that it was not liable to pay King the required $500 per unwanted call as outlined in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act because it thought it was calling Perez, who had consented to receiving the robocalls.
The judge, Alvin Hellerstein, disagreed, stating in his decision that TWC was irresponsible and had shockingly made almost half the calls after the lawsuit had been initiated: "Defendant harassed plaintiff with robocalls until she had to resort to a lawsuit to make the calls stop, and even then TWC could not be bothered to update the information in its IVR system."
Hellerstein found the violations so egregious that he found triple damages were in order. TWC has been ordered to pay King $1,500 per call, which adds up to an incredible $229,500.
Sergei Lemberg, the attorney for King stated that: "Companies are using computers to dial phone numbers. They benefit from efficiency, but there is a cost when they make people's lives miserable. This was one such case."
We bet that King's life is a lot less miserable right now, and that at this point, she wouldn't even mind receiving some additional robocalls from TWC at $1,500 a pop.
