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.

Waiting to Receive Multiple Calls Before Threatening Litigation
Because TCPA fines are levied on a per violation basis, litigators can juice their numbers by intentionally allowing a company to call them multiple times before they take action against the company.

Bullying for an Out of Court Settlement
Litigators will ambush defendants by threatening litigation with the intent of forcing an out-of-court settlement.

Taking Advantage of Reassigned Numbers
Litigators and serial plaintiffs will purchase multiple cell phones with the intent of manufacturing claims using phone numbers they know have been reassigned from their original owner.

Personally Targeting Corporate Officers in Lawsuits
By naming corporate officers and owners rather than merely the company itself, a litigator can apply additional pressure on a defendant.

Call Seeding
Litigators and their professional plaintiff accomplices will give consent for their numbers to be called. But rather than answering when called, they will call back from a different cell phone number for which they have not given consent, and talk just enough to identify themselves before hanging up, thus baiting agents into calling back without consent.