Marketing Law Blog

Judge triples reward for plaintiffs in Dish Network TCPA class action

Federal Judge Catherine C. Eagles ruled that the award for members of the Do Not Call Registry who allegedly received telemarketing calls from Dish Network should be increased to $1,200 per call. In January of this year, a jury determined that the amount should be just $400. This means that the potential payout of the class action lawsuit went up from $20 million to $60 million.

The plaintiffs in the case allege that Dish made over 50,000 calls to numbers on the national DNC list in 2010 and 2011. Dish argued that the violations were not willful, as they had instructed their third-party marketers to scrub their call data against the national DNC list. Unfortunately there was evidence that Dish was aware of the violations being committed by their contracted marketers and failed to act on them.

Judge Eagles found that, "...Dish Network willfully and knowingly violated the TCPA and that treble damages are appropriate to deter Dish and to give suitable weight to the seriousness and scope of the violations Dish committed. The Court will treble the jury’s damage award under 47 U.S.C. 227(c)(5) and increase the damages from $400 per call to $1,200 per call."

Read the full order here.

Learn more about Do Not Call compliance, third party telemarketing liability, and telemarketing fines.