Jackson Hewitt Telemarketing and Internal DNC Policy TCPA Class Action

Companies are still trying consumers’ patience with unwanted telemarketing, including telemarketing that is illegal under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). This class action brings suit against Jackson Hewitt Tax Service, Inc. for autodialed text message calls. The complaint alleges that the company has been sending these texts to the plaintiff “over the past several years…”

The class for this action is 

• All persons in the US
• To whose cell phones
• A text message was sent encouraging the purchase of Jackson Hewitt goods or services,
• Using a similar texting system as was used to text the plaintiff in this case, 
• Where Jackson Hewitt did not have a signed writing authorizing it to send automated telemarketing texts at the time the texts were sent.

A subclass of persons who received two or more texts within a twelve-month period has also been proposed.

This complaint alleges that plaintiff Jeff Hancock “received unsolicited, autodialed text message calls over the past several years, urging him to have Defendant[] Jackson Hewitt Tax Service, Inc. … do his taxes.”

On March 27, 2019, for example, the company sent a text message to Hancock’s cell phone through its texting vendor, CallFire. The complaint claims, “At the time of the text, [Hancock] was dealing with a family tragedy, and the text added to the chaos of life during this difficult time.” The complaint claims that the company had sent him text messages in in preceding years as well.

During that month, Hancock called his local Jackson-Hewitt office to complain. According to the complaint, “[t]he person with whom [Hancock] spoke stated that the local office had received numerous complaints about these texts, and that they had come from the ‘corporate office.’” That same person “promised to relay [Hancock’s] concerns, and request not to be called, to ‘corporate.’”

As an added measure, the complaint says, Hancock reply-texted “Stop” to the message he’d received, even though the message did not instruct him to do so.

The complaint claims that the texts sent by Jackson Hewitt were sent in “blasts” using an automatic dialing system.

The complaint also charges that Jackson Hewitt does not have proper internal provisions for people like Hancock. The TCPA, the complaint says, “prohibits all telemarketing phone calls and text messages unless the caller has, and honors, a written internal Do Not Call policy.” According to the complaint, however, the internal Do Not Call policy that Jackson Hewitt has posted on the Internet applies to Nevada residents only, and it does not tell consumers of their rights under the TCPA.

The complaint thus claims that the company’s policy is noncompliant, and that therefore it was not allowed to do any telemarketing at all. 

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Consumer
Tags: Failure to Place on Internal Do Not Call List, TCPA, Unsolicited Text Messages, Use of Automatic-Capable Dialer