Judge Dismisses TCPA Case vs. Company Targeted in FTC’s Robocall ‘Enforcement Sweep’

U.S. District Judge Joseph Rodriguez for New Jersey in Camden granted Vision Solar’s motion to dismiss plaintiff Brennan Landy’s first amended complaint for alleged Telephone Consumer Protection Act violations because Landy failed to provide “the sufficient foundation” for the claim that Vision Solar “does business under the fictitious name Solar Exchange,” said his signed order Monday (docket 1:21-cv-20241). Landy alleges in the amended complaint that during one of the unlawful calls he received, the call center operator told him that Solar Exchange and Vision are “partner companies,” said the order. That contradicts Landy’s assertion that Vision Solar and Solar Exchange “are not partner companies but are the same company,” it said. One of the five new robocall enforcement actions the FTC announced Tuesday to debut the multi-agency Operation Stop Scam Calls “enforcement sweep” (see 2307180035) targeted Solar Xchange (with a different spelling), a seller of residential solar panels, and its lead generator, Vision Solar, treating those defendants as separate companies. The complaint (docket 2:23-cv-01387) filed Friday in U.S. District Court for Arizona in Phoenix by the FTC, DOJ and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D), alleges the companies were responsible for placing tens of millions of illegal robocalls to phone numbers on the national do not call registry.