On a near-daily basis, I receive unsolicited pre-recorded telemarketing calls at my home telephone number. Such calls are illegal and have been for decades.
Between 2009 and 2014 several of these calls touted Carnival cruise ship deals. The telemarketer, Resort Marketing Group, made these calls indiscriminately. They harmed myriad people’s privacy and interrupted their home lives, all in alleged violation of the federal 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The TCPA was passed back in the innocent day when a southern senator (Ernest “Fritz” Hollings of South Carolina) characterized such telemarketing abuse as “telephone terrorism.”
When corporations abuse automation to violate the law, a huge number of times, against large numbers of people, where it is uneconomical for individual victims to fight back legally, the proper and efficient legal recourse is a class-action lawsuit. In this case, an appropriate settlement has been reached.
It is highly likely that other Boulder area residents received these same cruise deal telemarketing calls. If you have any memory of receiving one on your residential phone number, visit the website https://www.rmgtcpasettlement.com. Follow the instructions to enter your phone number to determine whether it was in the marketer’s dialing database. If it was, you may be eligible for up to $900 as part of the settlement. You must download a form, swear that the phone number was under your name during the relevant time period, and mail it to the class action administrator no later than Nov. 3.
As someone who for several years privately enforced the TCPA in Colorado, I applaud the plaintiff and his class-action lawyers for successfully holding these miscreants’ corporate feet to the fire.
Doug McKenna
Boulder
