TCPA Class Action
Per-text statutory damages times list size is the business model. Per-recipient consent evidence is what breaks class certification.
The TCPA's private right of action plus uncapped statutory damages built a litigation industry. One recipient with one unconsented text can represent a class of everyone who received the same campaign, and at $500 per message, a 100,000-send list is $50 million of nominal exposure before trebling.
The lifecycle: a demand letter or complaint arrives, often from a repeat-plaintiff firm; discovery targets consent records, suppression handling, and dialer configuration; certification turns on whether consent questions are common across the class. Settlements historically run from mid-six figures to the famous nine-figure outliers (Capital One's $75M-class era).
Defense pivots on individualized consent evidence. Defendants who can produce per-recipient consent records with the language shown and the act recorded defeat certification or settle cheaply; defendants with a CRM column that says "opted_in = true" fund the plaintiff bar.
Frequently asked questions
Related glossary terms
The TCPA fixes damages at $500 per violation, trebled to $1,500 for willful or knowing violations, with no proof of actual harm required and no statutory cap on aggregation.
Consent proof is the evidentiary record that a recipient explicitly opted in to SMS — typically a timestamped, IP-logged, hash-locked record of what the user saw and when they consented.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act is a US federal law (47 U.S.C. § 227) that restricts marketing calls and texts to mobile phones, with statutory damages of $500–$1,500 per violation.