We all remember Lynn v. Monarch Recovery Services, in which the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals decided calls made to a residential VoIP number where the owner was charged for the call, were illegal, just as if they had been made to a wireless phone without written consent.
Separately, in the recent 5th Circuit case of Rivero v. America’s Recovery Solutions, we find a similarly devastating result. The Court held that American Recovery’s calls violated the TCPA because his plan was not unlimited. Specifically, the Court held that, “Plaintiff’s VoIP service is not an unlimited calls/flat fee plan as the TCPA presumes is generally the case with a traditional residential telephone line…[r]ather, it is ‘a service for which the party is charged for the call…because each call by Defendant depletes Plaintiff’s store of limited minutes.
There is no regulatory exemption to this provision because the TCPA permits the FCC to create limited exemptions only to the prohibition of calls to certain cell phones (under subsection (A)) and to residential lines (under subsection (B)). Accordingly, Defendant’s calls to Plaintiff’s VoIP phone line violated the TCPA.”