Santander’s Calling System Still Violates TCPA, Court Finds

Santander Consumer USA’s Aspect calling system will still be considered an automatic telephone dialing system under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, according to a recent federal court decision.

The motion to reconsider filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois was based on the premise that the definition of an autodialer changed due to the outcome of a similar 2018 case, ACA International v. Federal Communications Commission, which rejected the FCC’s widened definition of an autodialer.

The debate hinges on whether predictive dialers are automatic telephone dialing systems, since they do not dial numbers “randomly or sequentially,” but rather “store pre-programmed numbers or receive numbers from a computer database and then dial those numbers in a manner that maximizes efficiencies for call centers,” the filing said.  In addition, Santander argued that an autodialer, by definition, had to be free of human intervention.

Santander’s dialer works in a similar manner. Customer service agents are required to be present before it will begin pulling numbers from an account management system to call.

U.S. District Judge Charles P. Kocoras, however, found that Aspect still fit the definition of an automatic dialer as set out by Congress. “Language in the [Hobbs Act] indicates that equipment that made automatic calls from lists of recipients was also covered by the TCPA,” he said.

Further, the court disagreed with Santander’s argument that an automatic dialer had to be free of human intervention. “According to Santander’s own description, its Aspect dialer — not the agents — makes the calls by dialing numbers from the uploaded list,” Kocoras said.

Santander Consumer USA declined to comment on the case.