Last week, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro announced that he had filed a lawsuit against a digital marketer for generating leads that allegedly resulted in “hundreds of thousands of unwanted robocalls to be placed to Pennsylvania consumers.” Shapiro’s lawsuit alleges that Fluent, Inc. and its subsidiaries “collected personal information, including telephone numbers, and that was then sold to telemarketing companies.”

According to Shapiro, thousands of these phone numbers were on Pennsylvania’s Do Not Call (DNC) List.
Shapriro alleges that Fluent collected the information for 4.2 million Pennsylvania consumers between 2018 and 2021. The specific violations that Shapiro alleges include assisting and facilitating calls to consumers on the state and federal DNC list, assisting and facilitating prerecorded calls to consumers without the proper consent, and engaging in deceptive and misleading business practices to generate leads.

This action illustrates the increasing action taken by state regulators to aggressively enforce telemarketing regulations as well as the way that regulators, like litigators, may target leads generators for alleged violations committed by leads buyers and their agents.