Mortgage robocall volume wanes, but TCPA suits persist

Consumers pestered with millions of mortgage robocalls got some relief at the beginning of the year, according to a new report.

Americans received 14.3 million mortgage robocalls in January, less than half of the 30.3 million they received in December, according to spam call blocking app Robokiller. Those home loan-related calls were a fraction of the 5.5 billion robocalls overall that were made last month, but still well above the amount of total car warranty and student loan calls.

The company attributed the decline to enforcement action by the Federal Communications Commission, which last month shut down an alleged robocall mortgage scam by brokerage MV Realty. The firm, according to suits by three state attorneys general, scammed homeowners into mortgaging their properties in exchange for cash payments. 

Real estate player Keller Williams last month also agreed to pay $40 million in a settlement in which it was accused of violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act in making unsolicited, pre-recorded calls to consumers on the Do Not Call Registry. The settlement was first reported by Real Trends.

Mortgage lenders have faced numerous lawsuits accusing them of violating the TCPA with calls to consumers on the registry, including at least 65 federal civil complaints since the beginning of 2022, according to a National Mortgage News analysis of publicly available court records. The suits target firms of all sizes including market behemoths like Rocket Mortgage and loanDepot. 

Some smaller companies hit with the complaints never responded to plaintiffs and courts awarded five-figure default judgments against them. Others moved to settle the cases for undisclosed amounts, and some plaintiffs also voluntarily dismissed their own complaints.

A consumer who sued Rocket last week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri accused the firm of hiding behind a labyrinth of telemarketing companies in making marketing calls to unwilling consumers. 

"Plaintiff and all members of the Class, defined below, have been harmed by the acts of Defendants and their deceptive marketing practices because their privacy has been violated, they were annoyed and harassed," wrote an attorney for Daniel Human, the Missouri-based plaintiff.

A spokesman for Rocket Mortgage in a statement Thursday morning criticized active TCPA lawsuits against the lender, calling the litigators "modern day ambulance chasers" and touted the company's reign atop J.D. Power awards for client satisfaction.

"Plaintiff's attorneys file baseless claims in a Hail Mary attempt to extract large settlement payouts for themselves," the statement said. "These cases, while fodder for wild headlines, are almost always quickly dismissed."

An attorney for the plaintiff in the Rocket case didn't respond to a request for comment.

Each violation of the TCPA costs a minimum of $500 in damages, and such lawsuits have cost banks tens of millions of dollars in recent years. The Supreme Court in 2020 also ended an exemption allowing autodialing to consumer cell phones for collections of government-related debt including mortgages.

The Supreme Court in 2021 meanwhile gave financial institutions a slight victory against TCPA lawsuits, in a unanimous ruling around the interpretation of what constitutes an autodialer in regards to unsolicited calls to consumers.