Reassigned Numbers

The TRACED Act implements a number of new regulations on robocalls, primarily by way of instructions to the FCC and other federal agencies and departments. Among the main provisions of the TRACED Act are the following:

Stopping Robocalls
The Act directs the FCC to take final action on its June 2019 Declaratory Ruling on Advanced Methods To Target and Eliminate Unlawful Robocalls. It directs the commission to implement these rules “with transparency and effective redress options for both… consumers; and… callers.”

Approximately 100,000 mobile phone numbers are reassigned by wireless carriers every day. Potentially 20% of data in an average consumer contact list could be made up of reassigned phone numbers. Therefore, theoretically, you could be liable for the maximum Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) violation of $500 per call or text on up to 20% of your entire campaign.

No, if you find yourself in this situation, there is no requirement to send notice to consumers.

Unscrupulous Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) litigators and professional plaintiffs often make use of a deep bag of tricks to induce costly TCPA violations. Some of their more frequent and damaging techniques are as follows:

Dual-Purpose Phone Lines
Sometimes referred to as “mixed-use” lines. Litigators will use one phone number for both business and personal purposes, potentially entrapping marketers who believe they are making calls to a business line when, in fact, it is a personal line for TCPA purposes.

The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) 2015 Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) Omnibus Declaratory Ruling and Order established a one-call safe harbor for reassigned phone numbers. This safe harbor applied to situations in which callers mistakenly called a phone number for which they had previously received consent but had since been reassigned to another person. Because consent is tied to the called party and not the phone number, the phone call in this situation would be considered a violation.

Consent applies to the called party. So, if a number is reassigned to a different person, whatever consent you may have had for that number is no longer valid. Because the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) is a strict liability statute—meaning violation is not contingent on fault or criminal intent—any call placed to a recycled number is a potential TCPA violation.