New York Post: Time Warner Cable to Pay $229K

TWC to Pay Out $229K for Robo Calling Woman Over 100 Times

By Josh Saul, July 8, 2015

Dealing with the cable company is never fun — especially when it starts stalking you.

A woman who was peppered with more than 100 annoying robo calls from Time Warner Cable won a $229,500 judgment from the company in Manhattan federal court Tuesday.

Araceli King says the cable giant pestered her relentlessly trying to collect a debt from a Luiz Perez, who had her phone number before she did.

The Texas woman claims that since July 2013, she had received 153 calls from Time Warner. The calls didn’t stop even after she spent seven minutes on the phone telling a company rep they had the wrong person.

Her suit claimed that she got 74 more calls from Time Warner after her court case was filed.

“She would get multiple calls at all hours of the day. She was pissed,” King’s lawyer, Sergei Lemberg, told The Post. “It’s man versus machine. These companies got their computers dialing like machine guns.

“They can make thousands of phone calls a minute, but there are real people on the receiving end of the call.”

King won $1,500 for each of the 153 calls she got after her seven-minute plea for peace.

That’s three times the normal damages for harassing robo calls, Judge Alvin Hellerstein wrote in a scathing decision.

“Defendant harassed plaintiff with robo calls until she had to resort to a lawsuit to make the calls stop, and even then, TWC could not be bothered to update the information in its system,” he said.

“Treble damages are unquestionably appropriate to reflect the seriousness of TWC’s willful violations.”

Hellerstein even said “a responsible business” would have had a live representative call after the robo calls failed to reach Perez.

A log of the calls filed as evidence shows King was harassed as early as 8:12 a.m. and often received three calls in one day — but sometimes, weeks would go by without calls.

Hellerstein ruled that Time Warner violated the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which outlaws certain robo and telemarketing calls.

The case would have gone to trial later this month.

Lemberg said King was very happy with the judge’s ruling.

“Regular people need to know that they don’t need to be harassed by robo-dialing companies,” said Lemberg.

“They have a right to say stop calling me and if the company fails to abide by their request, then they have a right to get a lawyer and sue.”

King, who works in administration for a corporation and lives in a Dallas suburb, declined to comment.

“We are reviewing the ruling and our options to determine how we are going to proceed,” a Time Warner spokeswoman said.

Original story: At New York Post