A Judge Is Making Time Warner Cable Pay $230,000 For Calling A Woman Over 150 Times In A Single Year

Reuters – Many people dislike receiving robocalls. Araceli King disliked receiving 153 of them from a single company.

Time Warner Cable Inc must pay the insurance claims specialist $229,500 for placing 153 automated calls meant for someone else to her cellphone in less than a year, even after she told it to stop, a Manhattan federal judge ruled on Tuesday.

King, of Irving, Texas, accused Time Warner Cable of harassing her by leaving messages for Luiz Perez, who once held her cellphone number, even after she made clear who she was in a seven-minute discussion with a company representative.

Time Warner Cable countered that it was not liable to King under the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, a law meant to curb robocall and telemarketing abuses, because it believed it was calling Perez, who had consented to the calls.

But in awarding triple damages of $1,500 per call for willfully violating that law, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein said “a responsible business” would have tried harder to find Perez and address the problem.

He also said 74 of the calls had been placed after King sued in March 2014, and that it was “incredible” to believe Time Warner Cable when it said it still did not know she objected.

That’s a hell of a fuck you even by Time Warner’s standards that tend to always involve directly shitting into consumer’s mouths. At first glance I thought this lawsuit was kind of frivolous and maybe it is — couldn’t she just block the number on almost every major cell phone provider with one second of effort? — but then I thought about it and HOLY SHIT do I hate when people call me. As I was writing this blog, my apartment’s management company called me because I still haven’t resigned my lease and I heard my phone’s ringtone go off and just wanted to throw it through a window. If you’re calling anyone these days for reasons other than your impending death, you deserve to be making the exact same cash payout. We can text message, we can email, we can do things that don’t narcissistically assume I’ve got five minutes to sit here and listen to your bullshit. Even girls I’ve dated; if I find out they’re one of those people who has to call you to make plans “because it’s so much easier,” they lose approximately 1,000 points right off the bat. Phone people are the worst and the sooner we get them out of the ecosystem the better.

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Also Luis Perez must be having some big time laughs right now. He is to Time Warner what Smitty was to the Avalon area police, just a rebel without a cause dodging the man at every turn. Who knows what he did to get this kind of robot phone attention but from what I can assume Luis Perez must be the Billy the Kid of deadbeats who didn’t return a cable box or forgetting to pay for that late night showing of Cheerleader Creampies on the Spice channel.