Class Action Accuses College Enrollment Marketing Agency of TCPA Wrongdoing
Edufficient.com, a college enrollment marketing agency, hired lead generator MediaSpike to find customers for client universities, which in turn retained subcontractors First Impressions and Boomsourcing to place prerecorded robocalls to consumers, in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, alleged…
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a class action Wednesday (docket 2:23-cv-03923) in U.S. District Court for South Carolina in Charleston. Plaintiff Mark Fitzhenry and his putative class members “never consented to receive these calls,” said his complaint. Because telemarketing campaigns “generally place calls to hundreds of thousands or even millions of potential customers en masse,” Fitzhenry brought the action on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other persons who received illegal telemarketing calls from or on behalf of Edufficient.com, it said. The complaint also alleges violations of the South Carolina Telephone Privacy Protection Act (SCTPPA), which prohibits a company from making a call to a South Carolina phone number that’s listed on the national do not call registry, as Fitzhenry’s number was before he received the calls. The SCTPPA provides for monetary penalties that are exponentially higher than those under the TCPA -- as much as $5,000 for each willful violation. Edufficient.com and MediaSpike “knowingly and actively accepted business” that originated through the illegal telemarketing calls from Boomsourcing, alleged the complaint. “Despite the fact that First Impressions has received repeated complaints alleging violations of the TCPA, MediaSpike continued to work with First Impressions,” it said. The complaint names Edufficient.com and MediaSpike as co-defendants, but not First Impressions or Boomsourcing.