Telephone Science Corporation (doing business as Nomorobo), has filed an unusual TCPA lawsuit against debt collection firm Harris & Harris Ltd. in the Northern District of Texas, alleging 16,554 violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and Texas consumer protection laws.
The Parties
Nomorobo protects consumers and businesses from unwanted robocalls and spam texts through its mobile apps and integrations with VoIP landline carriers. The core of its technology is a large, constantly updated database of known robocaller numbers, which is built in part by maintaining a “honeypot”—hundreds of thousands of unlisted, dormant phone numbers used to detect and identify robocalls.
When a call matches a number on its blocklist, Nomorobo automatically intercepts and blocks the call before it reaches the user, in theory only allowing legitimate calls to come through. The service is recognized by the FTC, offered for free on landlines, and is available as a paid app for mobile devices.
Harris & Harris is a Chicago-based debt collection agency with a significant call center presence in Coppell, Texas. The company specializes in collecting consumer debts, particularly in the healthcare, government, and utility sectors, and has faced regulatory scrutiny and legal action for its debt collection practices. Most notably, in 2024, the company agreed to pay $1 million to resolve a lawsuit brought by the Washington State Attorney General, and has been a frequent target of civil litigation brought under the TCPA and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA).
Nomorobo’s Complaint centers on unwanted robocalls the defendant allegedly placed to its honeypot lines, and the defendant is potentially liable for a staggering sum.
Nature of the Claims
According to the Complaint, Nomorobo maintains 290,000 unlisted, dormant “honeypot” phone lines to identify robocallers. These numbers, unused for years, are designed to attract autodialed calls, as legitimate users would not intentionally contact them. Nomorobo claims that over 99% of calls placed to its honeypot numbers are unwanted robocalls.
Nomorobo records the calls placed to its honeypot numbers to identify prerecorded robocalls. Once flagged as a robocall, the originating phone number is added to the company’s robocaller database. However, according to the Complaint once Nomorobo flags a number as spam, subsequent calls from that same number provide no operational benefit—only increased cost
Nomorobo claims that over the past four years, Harris & Harris placed 16,554 calls to its honeypot lines using an automated telephone dialing system (ATDS) in violation of 47 U.S.C. §227(b)(1)(A) of the TCPA. Each call played a prerecorded debt-collection message in further violation of the TCPA, along with §305.053 of the Texas Business & Commerce Code.
The company is seeking statutory damages of $500 per violation, trebled to $1,500 per willful
violation under the TCPA, as well as the same damages under the equivalent Texas statute. For the 16,554 calls, the claim totals a whopping $49,662,000.
Key Legal Challenges
Nomorobo’s case is far from a slam dunk. A critical hurdle to overcome is whether the company qualifies as a party subject to the protections granted by the TCPA. In 2016, a Northern District of Illinois court dismissed a similar case called Telephone Science Corporation. v. Asset Recovery Solutions, ruling that Nomorobo’s business model, which relies on robocalls to honeypot lines, placed it outside the statute’s "zone of interests."
However, in this case Nomorobo is instead claiming direct financial harm (in the form of telecom fees) as a concrete injury distinct from statutory damages, which more closely aligns with recent TCPA lawsuit rulings where economic harm sufficed for standing.
Nomorobo must also prove that Harris & Harris utilized an ATDS when placing the calls, and to support its treble damages claim it must demonstrate that the calls were placed in “knowing and willful” violation of the TCPA.
Likelihood of Success
Although Nomorobo’s case appears stronger than its 2016 effort, due to its framing the harm it suffered as concrete operational costs rather than abstract privacy violations, and Texas courts have been known to be sympathetic to TCPA claims. However, the court in this case may nevertheless rule that Nomorobo lacks standing to bring a TCPA claim, in light of the fact that its entire business model relies on receiving and identifying unsolicited robocalls.
As argued by the defendant in Nomorobo’s previous TCPA lawsuit, the TCPA guards against the “invasion of privacy, the nuisance, and the cost that results when consumers receive certain types of unwanted calls; it does not protect a company that “intentionally sought out the alleged calls so that it could build and sustain its for-profit telecom business.”
In other words, the costs Nomorobo claims to have sustained as a result of the Harris & Harris calls might simply be viewed by this court as the overall costs of conducting its business, and that Nomorobo should have no right to use the TCPA as a tool to offset those costs.
However, if the case is allowed to proceed and is either settled or decided in Nomorobo’s favor, we can be certain it will not be the last of its kind.
