Moore v. Farmers Group, Inc., No. 23-cv-16587, 2025 WL 2962623 (N.D. Ill. Oct. 20, 2025)
Plaintiff filed a putative class action lawsuit alleging, among other claims, that Defendant violated Section 227(b)(1) of the TCPA, which prohibits calls using an artificial of prerecorded voice without the prior express consent of the called party. See 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(1). Plaintiff’s claim was based on a contention that he received a call from a live operator, spoke with the operator but when the operator tried to transfer the call, a recording played stating: “This phone number is in the Do Not Call list. Do not transfer this phone number.”
According to Plaintiff, Section 227(b)(1)(A) covers calls made by live operators if at some point during the call, an artificial or prerecorded voice plays. Recognizing that the issue before it was one of statutory interpretation, the Court began its analysis by looking to the “ordinary, contemporary, common meaning” of the TCPA’s text, focusing on the word “make” which appears in Section 227(b)(1)(A) as a part of the phrase “make any call [. . .] using an artificial or prerecorded voice,” stating that the “ordinary meaning of making a call means dialing, placing, or initiating a call, either manually by a human being or—as Congress recognized when it passed the TCPA—through automated technology that allowed calls to be placed en masse without need for a live human operator, i.e., a robocall.”
Dismissing Plaintiff’s claim, the Court concluded that:
the facts as alleged do not plausibly establish either that the first call was made using an artificial or prerecorded voice, or that a secondary call-within-a-call was made using an artificial or prerecorded voice. To the contrary, if anything, the secondary call was stopped by virtue of an artificial or prerecorded voice. The Court declines to interpret the text of the TCPA beyond its common meaning of initiating a call, especially in a case where the prerecorded voice was used to halt the type of unwanted telemarketing activity that the TCPA was designed to address.
A copy of the Court’s opinion can be found by clicking here.
PartnerJoshua Threadcraft is a trial and class action attorney in Burr & Forman’s Financial Services Practice Group with more than two decades of experience during which he has served as first chair counsel in bench, jury trials and ...
