Willful TCPA Violation: How to Prove the Caller Knew

What you have to show for the willful tier

The statute lets a court award up to three times the $500 baseline when a violation was “willful or knowing.” Courts have read that phrase to mean the company intended to place the call and knew the facts that made it unlawful, such as the number being a cell phone or the consent being absent. You do not have to prove the company wanted to break the law or wanted to harass you.

Because the question is notice, the evidence is mostly documents and timelines. The rest of this page walks through the four sources that carry these cases.

Evidence one: your stop request and the calls after it

A stop request is the cleanest proof of knowledge there is. Once you have told the company you do not want the calls, every later call is a call it knew it had no permission to make. What matters is being able to show two things: when you said stop, and which calls came after.

• Written revocation is easiest to prove: a reply of STOP to a text, an email, a letter, a chat transcript.
• Verbal revocation counts too, but you need the date. Write it down the day it happens, along with who you spoke to if you know.
• The call log after that date is the other half. Do not delete anything. Screenshots of the log with dates visible are enough to start.

In Campbell v. Everything Breaks (No. 2:23-cv-00861, D. Nev.), calls placed after people opted out were part of what drove a $995,000 settlement. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome, and every case is different.

Evidence two: a Do Not Call listing the company ignored

Telemarketers are required to check their lists against the National Do Not Call Registry at least every 31 days. A company that keeps calling a registered number either did not check or checked and called anyway. Either way, the registry gives the caller constructive notice, and courts treat repeated calls to a registered number as evidence the company was not trying to comply.

Two things make this evidence usable:

• Your registration date. You can verify it at donotcall.gov, which emails you a confirmation of the date your number was added.
• More than one call in a 12-month period from the same company after that date, which is also the threshold for a Do Not Call claim on its own.

Evidence three: prior complaints and the company’s own file

Companies keep notes. When a collector’s file shows an agent typed “wrong number” six months before the calls you are suing over, that note is proof of knowledge. The same is true of earlier complaints to the company, disputes you sent, a Better Business Bureau complaint, or a regulator complaint the company received.

You will not have most of this in hand at the start. It comes out in discovery, the stage of a lawsuit where the company must produce its records. Your attorney asks for the account notes, the complaint history, and the dialer’s disposition codes for your number. When those records show the company flagged your number and kept dialing, the willful argument writes itself.

In Higgs v. Golden Title Loans (No. 2:20-cv-2559, W.D. Tenn.), 385 wrong-number calls were assessed at $1,500 each on summary judgment, $577,500 in total. The court had the calling records in front of it. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Evidence four: dialer logs that show the calls were deliberate

The last category rebuts the most common defense: that the calls were a mistake. Dialer logs show the campaign name, the list your number was on, how many attempts were made, the result of each attempt, and whether the system was set to keep retrying. A number dialed 40 times over three weeks on a campaign called “warranty outbound” was not a slip.

Building the willful record now

You can start the record before any lawyer is involved. Send a written stop request and keep a copy. Register on the Do Not Call list if you have not. Save your call log and voicemails. Write a one-page timeline: first call, the day you said stop, the calls after. That timeline is what a free review starts with.

Whether damages are trebled is a decision for the court, every case is different, and prior results do not guarantee an outcome. What you control is the evidence, and the evidence of knowledge is usually the difference between the $500 tier and the $1,500 tier.

Related: What the $1,500 TCPA penalty is · Calls after you said stop · How to revoke consent to calls · Do Not Call violations