Supreme Court Makes Debt Collection Robocalling Illegal (Again)

News

from the round-and-round-we-go dept

While the US government often makes a lot of noise about their efforts to crack down on robocalls, the reality is they never actually do all that much. While the FCC often goes out of its way to advertise “record” fines levied against smaller companies and scammers, the vast, vast majority of those fines are never actually collected. The Pai FCC has claimed to have made great strides fighting the menace, despite the fact that most of its recent and well-hyped countermeasures are neither new nor effective.

One big reason for our failures is that the government often likes to turn a blind eye to the fact that the biggest and most annoying robocallers aren’t scammers, but legitimate companies and debt collectors, many of which call customers (that they know can’t pay) upwards of dozens of times a day. In testimony a few years back, consumer advocate Margot Freeman Saunders offered a breakdown of which organizations and companies are the most prodigious robocallers:

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 prohibits the majority of robocalls, but Congress, in its infinite lack of wisdom, in 2015 amended the law to add an exemption for debt collectors trying to reach you on your cellphone. The problem is that debt collectors, as Saunders noted in her testimony, utilize many of the same tactics (spoofing, etc.) as shadier robocallers, and are certainly no less annoying and unscrupulous in their tactics. In many instances they’re simply attempting to extract blood from a stone, but the government and FCC routinely like to pretend otherwise.

This week, in a bit of good news, the Supreme Court struck down that exemption entirely (pdf), making it illegal again for debt collectors to embrace robocalling.

It’s a beneficial outcome to a case that started with less noble intentions. The original case stems from an attempt by telemarketers and political robocalling organizations to strike down the TCPA entirely, under the basis that the 2015 government debt exception unconstitutionally favored debt collection speech over political and other speech. But, flipping that case on its head, the Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 that the 2015 Congressional update to the law “impermissibly favored debt collection speech over political and other speech, in violation of the First Amendment. From the opinion, written by Brett Kavanaugh:

“As the Government concedes, the robocall restriction with the government-debt exception cannot satisfy strict scrutiny. The Government has not sufficiently justified the differentiation between government-debt collection speech and other important categories of robocall speech, such as political speech, issue advocacy, and the like.” Government-backed loans affected by the ruling include student loans, home mortgages, veterans’ loans, farm loans, and business loans.”

In a joint statement, Senator Ed Markey and Representative Anna Eshoo praised the ruling as a win for consumers:

“The court rightly found that government debt collectors aren’t entitled to a special exception to the TCPA’s ban on robocalling. We applaud the court’s decision to side with American consumers, protect our right to privacy from these abusive calls, deter countless scams that target our most vulnerable populations, and ensure that our phones will remain usable.”

In short, it’s a positive outcome to a case that started with the goal of eliminating robocall restrictions entirely. And it does, albeit not entirely intentionally, a nice job deflating the government’s often lazy effort to conflate robocalling harassment exclusively with “scammer.”

Filed Under: debt collection, debt collectors, robocalling, supreme court