Prolific Plaintiffs Create Expensive Consequences for Pesky Telemarketers
What part of “do not call” do telemarketers not understand? It seems that no matter how many times people list their phones as off-limits for robocalls, the calls continue to flood in. They interrupt the workday. They waste time. They annoy the he
ll out of pretty much everyone. And they very typically are scams that victimize the vulnerable. Max and Marilyn Margulis of Chesterfield decided to fight back, and they fought back hard. It wasn’t easy, largely because telemarketers go to great lengths to hide who hired them. But the Margulises have secured more than $2 million in court judgments, sending a strong message to telemarketers that no means no when it comes to phone harassment. We’re not always on the side of those who prolifically sue, but in this case, we’re fans.
In this era of hypercommunication, marketers have direct lines into peoples’ homes, workplaces and lives whether people want them there or not. The scourge of telemarketers who flood people’s cellphones and landlines with sales pitches, many of them scams, has prompted the federal government and Missouri (along with other states) to create nocall lists that marketers are supposed to comply with. The lists are clearly popular with consumers. Missouri’s state list alone has more than 4 million phone numbers on it.
But as most modern consumers know, telling marketers to leave them alone often isn’t enough. Even people who have put their numbers on the do-not-call lists frequently continue to be inundated by calls. Since enforcement of the no-call lists is mostly by civil litigation, there generally isn’t a big downside for businesses that just plain violate the law by calling numbers on the lists.
That is, unless the callers are unlucky enough to call the Margulises. As the Post-Dispatch’s Erin Heffernan reported, Max Margulis, an attorney specializing in telemarketing cases, has filed more than 45 such suits in St. Louis County on his wife’s behalf since 2017 (as well as a 2012 suit that was dismissed against Lee Enterprises, which owns the Post-Dispatch). The couple has won judgments of some $2.6 million. Not all have paid, but the couple has received more than $600,000, plus undisclosed out-of-court settlements.
It’s about more than money. “I do it to enforce my rights as a consumer,” Max Margulis said. “I’ve told several defendants that if I never got another call I would retire and be happy.” Some skeptics fairly argue that being a professional plaintiff is, like telemarketing itself, a societal scourge. But there are simply too many telemarketers and victims for the no-call lists to be realistically enforceable with criminal charges, and even lawsuits by the Missouri attorney general’s office and its counterparts around the country can’t be expected to confront them all. Fear of crossing the Margulises of the world may ultimately be the best weapon against this pernicious industry.
Reprinted from the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch
“In this era of hypercommunication, marketers have direct lines into peoples’ homes, workplaces and lives whether people want them there or not.”
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch