5 Recent Court Decisions for Text Message Marketers and TCPA Troll Manning Law

LITTLE ROCK, AR / ACCESSWIRE / December 15, 2015 / In an exclusive interview with Mobilemarketer.com Editor in Chief Mickey Alam Khan, Tim Miller, president of Sumotext Corp., offers an in-depth explanation of the TCPA, and the effects the FCC’s rules are having on text message marketers.

The complete transcript of that interview is available at: Favorable TCPA court decision for text message marketers, and includes details on recent TCPA court decisions and the frivolous TCPA demand letters being circulated by Manning Law.

Background on the TCPA, FCC, and Manning Law

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 required businesses to collect prior express written consent before making “unsolicited, automated telephone calls”. In February 2012 the FCC pulled text message marketing into the TCPA when they said text messages were the same as phone calls and text message broadcast systems were the same as automated telephone dialing systems (ATDS) effective October 16, 2013.

Even though “prior express written consent” has remained a tenet of the mobile messaging ecosystem since its inception, many responsible marketers that practice and fully follow the Commission’s rules have spent much of 2015 dealing with frivolous TCPA demand letters from Manning Law of Newport Beach, CA.

The Manning Law attorneys and employees will text “JOIN” to a company’s common short code (CSC) to opt-in to a recurring text message program. They then lie in wait to receive the messages requested before claiming TCPA damages. Specifically, they will claim that the business cannot prove that the FCC’s TCPA disclosure requirements were satisfied.

To help prevent these types of frivolous demand letters, SUMOTEXT submitted a Petition for Expedited Clarification to the FCC in September 2015.

The SUMOTEXT petition asked for the Commission’s confirmation that when a company receives a text message from a consumer requesting to receive more than one text message returned to them, that a combination of: (1) the company’s Call to Action (“CTA”) advertisement; (2) the content of the inbound text message request the consumer sent to the company; and (3) the content of the company’s opt-in confirmation message reply to the consumer can be used as evidence that the disclosures required by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (“TCPA”) were provided in a “clear and conspicuous” manner.

SUMOTEXT urged the Commission to grant this petition to ensure that businesses will have a clear means to prove, through tangible electronic records, that all of the terms, conditions, and disclosures associated with a consumer’s prior express written consent to receive marketing messages under the TCPA were actually provided to the consumer who requested the content.

While Manning Law has never actually filed a formal TCPA action against any text message content provider or service provider, there are now 5 favorable court decisions businesses can reference when responding to a frivolous TCPA demand letter from Manning Law.

About SUMOTEXT

SUMOTEXT was founded in 2007 in Little Rock, Arkansas to help brands, agencies, and nonprofits kick-start and sustain conversations and commerce with mobile audiences via SMS, MMS, mobile coupons, and mobile wallets. The SUMOTEXT mobile relationship management platform and APIs control the full life cycle of mobile messaging and engagement. Beyond the basics of opt-in and opt-out, the SUMOTEXT platform is loaded with dashboards, real-time reports, and intuitive utilities for segmentation and targeting that enable true 1-to-1 marketing.

Sumotext Corp.
Tim Miller, President
http://www.sumotext.com/

SOURCE: Sumotext Corp.

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