New Life Predicted For Consumer Protection Agency

A TCPA defense blog looks at a recent policy statement from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and doesn’t like what it sees. “Unfortunately, it looks like we might be on a path back to 2015-era UDAAP enforcement,” writes Squire Patton Boggs attorney Daniel L. Delnero on the firm’s TCPA World blog (re the Telephone Consumer Protection Act).

Delnero is alluding to what he considers unfair enforcement actions under former CFPB director Richard Cordray. Back then, he laments, the Bureau “routinely launched invasive enforcement actions against companies for violating UDAAP – Unfair, Deceptive, and Abusive Acts and Practices – even though the alleged violation was not prohibited by any other statute or regulation.” That meant that the actionable abuse existed “in the eye of the beholder,” he says, and included conduct that had been considered legal for decades. That’s the standard we can now expect, according to Delnero, and that  means a more aggressive CFPB, after a respite under the Trump administration,

In another TCPA World post, attorney Eric J. Troutman reports that in one week early this month, three TCPA lawsuits were filed against right-leaning political groups over robocalls. One of them, a lawsuit filed in the Central District of CA, targeted two Trump PACS (including Trump Make America Great Again, or “TMAGAC,” and the Republican National Committee). Such lawsuits are not uncommon after political campaigns, according to Troutman, and he predicts more of them. One day later he published an update citing one more case, this one filed against the Republican National Committee in Texas.