Dish Network will have to pay more than $60 million — three times the originally calculated damages — for sales reps who made repeated, unwanted cold calls to thousands of people on the Do Not Call Registry.
Back in January, a jury in North Carolina found Dish Network responsible for repeated marketing calls made to more than 51,000 calls to 18,000 folks whose numbers were on the Do Not Call list.
Dish didn’t technically place the calls itself; a third-party company it hired did. But the class-action lawsuit ended with Dish being held responsible for its vendor’s actions. The jury had to determine how much Dish owed, on a scale of $0 to $500. They settled on $400 for each illegal call — adding up to a total of $20.5 million.
But this week, the Associated Press reports, the judge overseeing the case decided that’s just not enough, and tripled the penalty. It’s now going to be $1200 per person, because it needs to be “appropriate to deter Dish and to give suitable weight to the seriousness and scope of the violations Dish committed.”
That puts Dish on hook for more than $60 million in payouts to customers its vendor kept calling. While that is significantly higher, though, it’s still not going to make a dent as far as Dish’s bottom line is concerned: Its subscriber-related revenue for just the first three months of this year was $3.64 billion.
by Kate Cox via Consumerist