Educational Credit Management Call Recording Without Permission CIPA Class Action

The Educational Credit Management Corporation (ECMC) services student loans. In the course of its work, it talks to many Californians on their cell phones. The complaint for this class action alleges that ECMC records all of these conversations, even if it does not have these persons permission to do so, and so violates of the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA).

CIPA requires that parties like ECMC must warn individuals if a call is being monitored or recorded.

The plaintiff for this class action, Beheshta Mahboob, called ECMC on her cell phone, on or around March 27, 2015. The complaint alleges that, during the call, Mahboob discussed confidential information with the company. The complaint alleges, “The telephone call between Plaintiff Mahboob and [ECMC’s] representative concerned personal financial affairs that Plaintiff Mahboob had not openly discussed with others.”

The complaint alleges that ECMC recorded the conversation, without Mahboob’s knowledge or consent. ECMC did not warn Mahboob about this, the complaint says, and she did not hear any intermittent beeping that might have warned her. She did not give her consent to the recording of the call, the complaint claims.

The complaint quotes from the law itself, saying, “Every person who, without the consent of all parties to a communication, intercepts or receives and intentionally records, or assists in the interception or reception and intentional recordation of, a communication transmitted between two cellular radio telephone, a cellular radio telephone and a landline telephone, two cordless telephones, a cordless telephone and a landline telephone, or a cordless telephone and a cellular radio telephone” violates that section of the law.

The complaint alleges that ECMC “violated [Mahboob’s] constitutionally protected privacy rights by failing to advise or otherwise provide notice at the beginning of the recorded conversations with [Mahboob] that the call would be recorded and [ECMC] did not try to obtain [Mahboob’s] consent before such recording.”

The complaint alleges, upon information and belief that ECMC has recording equipment installed on its lines and that many of its inbound lines “were erroneously set with a non-mandatory message setting.”

The class for this action is all individuals who, between August 2, 2014 and March 31, 2015, participated in an inbound telephone conversation with a live representative of ECMC that was (1) placed to an ECMC phone line that used the non-mandatory message setting for its admonition that the call is being recorded, (2) where the call was made from a telephone number with a California area code (3) and transmitted via a cellular telephone, (4) where the inbound caller waited on hold for less than four seconds.

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Privacy
Tags: CIPA, Recording Calls Without Consent, Your Privacy