Dish Found Liable for Millions of Violations of FTC Telemarketing Rules

The FTC won a partial summary judgment against Dish Network for “tens of millions of calls” violating the commission’s telemarketing rules, said the FTC in a news release Wednesday. The FTC was a co-plaintiff along with Illinois, Ohio and North Carolina in the case, which was filed in 2009, the agency said. A U.S. District Court judge in Springfield, Illinois, said Dish and its vendors were responsible for more than 4.09 million calls made to numbers on the Do Not Call registry, and Dish retailers were responsible for another 2.73 million calls to numbers on the registry. The court also said Dish was responsible for more than 1.04 million calls to consumers who had already told Dish they didn’t want to receives such calls and whose phone numbers were on a Dish internal do-not-call list. “The court left the issue of whether Dish is liable for any entity-specific violations relating to its retailers to be determined at trial,” the FTC said. Dish and three of its retailers also were found to be responsible for nearly 49.74 million “abandoned calls" -- outbound calls where the person answering is not connected with a sales person within two seconds. Prerecorded telemarketing messages violate the abandoned call rule because the telemarketer is not connecting the call to a sales representative within two seconds, the FTC said. Because the FTC won only a partial summary judgment, other aspects of the case, such as Dish’s responsibility for its retailers in some instances, remain to be litigated at trial, the FTC said. Dish "respectfully disagrees with the bulk of the decision by the Court," a company spokesman told us. The FTC has "outsourced the management of the National Do Not Call Registry to contractors, with minimal oversight, resulting in a Registry that is inaccurate and that the U.S. Government itself characterizes as ‘a mess,’" Dish said. "While the FTC acknowledges its own failures regarding the maintenance of the Registry, it nonetheless attempts to hold American businesses to a different standard."