iHere is an odd one.
A couple of folks are involved in a car accident.
One of them submits a claim to the insurer–GEICO. She includes the cellular phone number of another one of the passengers.
She testifies the passenger gave her his number to include. The guy–turned Plaintiff–claims he never gave her that number to give GEICO.
GEICO gives the guy’s number to a vendor to examine him in connection with the accident. Guy stops cooperating with GEICO and vendor sends prerecorded appointment reminder messages.
Guy sues vendor for sending the prerecorded messages claiming the vendor never had his consent.
So vendor moves for summary judgment in the case claiming it had consent from the lady who provided the guy’s phone number. Court disagrees.
In Michael Smith v. Examworks, 2024 WL 622102 (D. Md. Feb 14, 2024) the Court concluded a question of fact existed respecting whether the lady had Smith’s consent to provide the number to GEICO. Although the lady testified he had provided the number the Court had to credit Smith’s version of events, which is that he never provided that specific number and used it only for video calling.
He claims that he had been video calling the lad yaround the same time and that is probably why she gave the number to GEICO. His phone records confirmed that he did not use that number for calls very often. So the court had to credit his version of events.
So GEICO’s vendor is headed to trial on whether the prerecorded calls were illegal.
Fascinating no?
I think its interesting that the guy essentially stopped cooperating with GEICO leading to the calls at issue and then sued for them. You don’t see something like that very often.
For what its worth I think the court got this one right. While a number can be provided through an intermediary there has to be consent from the called party for the number to be supplied. Here there may not have been. The jury has to sort it out.
