iThe saga of Abante Rooter is an epic tale here in TCPAWorld.
The company has filed dozens (hundreds?) of TCPA suits, often times as putative class actions, arising from alleged calls and faxes to their business phone. It is unclear to me whether Abante Roote is a business at all other than just to collect TCPA revenue.
As one court recently wrote:
Abante is a prolific filer of putative class actions like this one, alleging defendants have violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act… Since 2017, Abante appears to have brought more than 70 such cases in this District, represented by the same plaintiff’s counsel in each case. While the court has not reviewed the dockets of all those cases in detail, it appears virtually all of them have resulted in requests for dismissal pursuant to individual settlements, before any class certification motion has been brought.
Yet people keep allegedly calling and faxing Abante Rooter without permission. Bizarre.
Obviously the Abante Rooters of the world cry out for action by Congress to issue in TCPA reform–as well as the use of litigator scrubs like DNC.com’s for folks that make outbound phone calls–but there is even more to this tale than it seems.
In Abante Rooter v. Signify Health, 2024 WL 1421279 (N.D. Cal. April 2, 2024), for instance, it turns out calls to Abante Rooter aren’t going to the business at all but to someone named Fred Heidarpour (any relation to Andrew I wonder not wondering?)
Abante asked the court to amend the complaint to name Fred in place of Abante but the Court wasn’t having it:
The motion for leave to amend insists this is a simple correction of the name of the plaintiff, and some related adjustments to
the claims, given that the calls were made to a landline rather than a cell phone. The motion asserts “Plaintiff here seeks to
correct an error as to the named Plaintiff, rather than add a wholly new one with no connection to the allegations in the original
complaint.” The motion, however, does seek to drop the existing plaintiff and add a wholly new one. While the proposed new
plaintiff may have a “connection” to the allegations of the existing complaint, the amendment would still have the effect of
dismissing the original plaintiff and bringing in a new and legally distinct plaintiff. 1
Nor is this simply a substitution of one
putative class member for another to serve as named plaintiff. Abante has effectively conceded it has no claim in this action—
it is not the person to whom the allegedly wrongful calls were placed, and it does not own that phone number…
Accordingly, the motion for leave to file an amended complaint is denied. In light of Abante’s apparent concession that it has no
claim against defendant in this action, Abante is ordered to show cause within two weeks of the date of this order why the action
should not be dismissed. In the event no response to this order is timely filed, the case will be dismissed without further notice
Get it?
Abante filed a case even though the calls were not made to Abante but to some guy named Fred. Abante’s counsel tried to bring Fred in but the Court said no– that’s a totally different lawsuit. So Fred has to file his own suit. And the class won’t be prejudiced because, come on, these guys never certify them anyway (the court’s analysis, not my words.)
