Rocket Mortgage refutes the latest consumer TCPA lawsuit

Rocket Mortgage is refuting the claims brought by a new spam call plaintiff, as consumers continue to churn out complaints against lenders over unwanted mortgage solicitations.

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Ohio resident Noverto Rosado sued Rocket Wednesday in a Michigan federal court after an affiliated loan officer allegedly dialed him over 40 times in May. It’s the fifth lawsuit against the megalender in the past year for purported violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. 

The Rosado case comes the same week that a plaintiff sued the California-based Catalyst Mortgage over similar accusations. Consumers, most of whom aren’t borrowers, have filed dozens of TCPA claims against mortgage lenders, most of them brokerages, since the beginning of the year. 

The law provides for damages between $500 to $1,500 per violation for calls and text messages sent to affected plaintiffs. That provision has resulted in a few big paydays for some of those consumers and their attorneys.

According to the latest lawsuit, Rosado was first called by Rocket in early May, and he claims he did not give his consent to be contacted again. He alleges calls and text messages from the lender persisted, including a text from a Rocket loan officer who identified himself with his actual licensing number. 

Rosado listed in his complaint timestamps of 40 calls from a toll-free number, purported to be Rocket, occurring from morning to evening, all throughout May.

In a statement Thursday afternoon, Rocket said it was confident the complaint “will end the way many other TCPA claims do, with dismissal.”

“Rocket has never lost a TCPA case and we don’t expect to start,” the company said in an email. “In this case, our files show that the plaintiff submitted multiple leads with consent to communicate and never replied to any text asking Rocket to cease communications.”

An attorney for Rosado declined to comment Thursday. 

The lawsuit seeks to certify a class of individuals who are on the national Do Not Call Registry but were contacted by Rocket multiple times in the past year despite not giving their consent. 

Endless TCPA litigation

Consumers have filed four other TCPA suits against Rocket in the past year. The lender agreed with one of those plaintiffs to take their spam call accusations to arbitration, according to a federal case docket, while three other cases remain ongoing. 

Plaintiffs have filed 270 TCPA complaints in federal courts against various business defendants in May, a slowdown from the April pace, according to litigation intelligence platform WebRecon. However, TCPA filings through the end of May are up around 30% annually, with 1,398 such cases. Exacerbating the caseload, 80% of those filings were class action suits. 

Many of the lawsuits filed against lenders earlier this year remain pending, and few lenders have formally responded to the charges. Even fewer cases have reached discussions over potential class certification or settlement talks, while other filings have been quietly dismissed in the past year. 

The flood of cases however may prove a headache for industry firms already weighing an influx of other types of consumer litigation, such as servicing disputes.