A Florida insurance company will pay $4.25 million to settle allegations that it made unauthorized sales calls to consumers who had placed themselves on the federal Do Not Call registry.
A&B Insurance and Financial was accused, in a class-action lawsuit, of violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The company has agreed to establish a settlement fund to pay customers who, from August of 2012 through April of this year, received a call within a year of being placed on the Do Not Call list, or a call from an automatic dialing system.
Lead consumers Jim Youngman and Robert Allen estimated that each qualifying member of the class would get about $85 after attorneys’ fees and costs were deducted from the settlement.
Youngman and Allen sued the insurer in August. Youngman claimed that he began getting telemarketing calls in January of last year – including one call during which he was asked for his Social Security number. Youngman had never done business with A&B Insurance, and he’d been registered on the federal Do Not Call list for more than a decade.
Allen claimed that A&B Insurance contacted him in December of 2015, using an auto-dialer and a pre-recorded call.
A&B Insurance continues to deny that it violated the TCPA. The lead consumers agreed to settle.
“Plaintiffs believe that the claims asserted in the action have merit,” they wrote in court filings. “Nonetheless, plaintiffs and their counsel recognize and acknowledge the expense, time, and risk associated with continued prosecution of the action against A&B Insurance. Therefore, plaintiffs and their counsel believe that it is desirable that the released claims be fully and finally compromised, settled, dismissed with prejudice.”
