Macy’s Accused of Sending Unlawful Texts to ‘Tens of Thousands’

Defendant Macy’s sent plaintiff James Williams "repeated unsolicited" automated telemarketing text messages to his residential cellphone to a number listed on the national do not call registry since June, alleged Williams’ Telephone Consumer Protection Act class action Thursday (docket 3:23-cv-00312) in U.S. District Court for Connecticut. The retailer's texts to Williams “were a form of communication that Macy’s also sent to tens of thousands of other consumers with identical or substantially identical verbiage,” it said. Many of the text messages, including some Williams, a Connecticut resident, received, “were identical across all call recipients,” it said. “Even where there were minute differences between messages, it was the result of the sophisticated, automated nature of Macy’s autodialer systems,” it said. The dialing system Macy’s used to place the text message calls “automatically populated generic message templates with information its system attributed to the particular phone number it intended to contact,” it said. The system “then populates specific data into the template -- similar to a mail merge -- and automatically sends these text messages en masse,” it said. Macy’s knew it didn’t have consent to send the messages but nevertheless continued to text Williams, it said: “Macy’s has the ability to immediately stop text messages from being sent to those who request not to receive them, but it has failed to ensure that this occurs.”