The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently issued a decision which further clarifies the definition of an “autodialer” or “automatic telephone dialing system” under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”) – an act which prohibits marketers from using “autodialing” technology to call phone number en masse without the recipient’s consent. The Ninth Circuit issued an opinion on November 16, 2022, finding that the TCPA requires that an autodialer must be able to generate a telephone number and dial that number in a random or sequential order. The panel held that the calls placed by the defendant eFinanical, LLC were not prohibited by the TCPA because the company used a “sequential number generator,” which did not generate a telephone number but only produced a number used to determine the order in which the calls to customers were made.
Ninth Circuit Opinion