TCPA Plaintiff Opposes Motion to Dismiss Claims Under Other Statutes

Plaintiff Bryan Reo opposes Allstate’s Feb. 28 motion to dismiss the counts of his Telephone Consumer Protection Act complaint that allege the insurer also violated Ohio’s Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA), Consumer Sales Practices Act (CSPA) and Telephone Solicitation Sales Act (TSSA), said his opposition Friday (docket 1:23-cv-00329) in U.S. District Court for Northern Ohio in Cleveland. The court should deny Allstate’s motion to dismiss “in its entirety” because Reo “has stated plausible claims,” and the relevant statutes are “applicable” to Allstate “under the present circumstances,” it said. Reo alleges the Allstate agent who called him Dec. 14 on his cellphone to solicit insurance services knew a significant amount of personal information about him, based on Allstate’s unlawful disclosures about him to the agent. Allstate is correct to assert the DPPA’s Section 2721 against the disclosure of personal information to outside parties applies only to state motor vehicle departments, said Reo, a Mentor, Ohio, lawyer representing himself. But the “bulk” of the statute provides a private right of action against “any person” who violates it, he said. Likewise, “a careful reading” of the CSPA reveals the exemption for insurance companies “only applies as between insurance companies *and* their customers,” he said. “Cold-call illicit telemarketing,” as Reo alleges Allstate engaged in, “is well outside the scope of what was encompassed” in the CSPA, he said. Reo isn’t, and never has been, an Allstate customer, so the insurance company exemption doesn’t apply, he said. Allstate also is “simply wrong” to assert “a blanket and unqualified exemption” from the TSSA, said his opposition. If Allstate violated the TCPA by making the unwanted solicitations to Reo’s phone, “then it stands to reason that they were not acting within the scope of their license or authorization to tele-solicit within the confines of the exemption provided to insurance companies within the TSSA,” it said. Whether Allstate “was acting within the scope of its license or authorization” under the TSSA’s insurance company exemption “is not a question of law to be resolved” on a motion to dismiss, “but rather is a question of fact that will be resolved after discovery,” it said. If Allstate believes Reo has “insufficiently pleaded” his DPPA, CSPA or TSSA claims, he will seek leave from the court to amend his complaint, “and cure any factual deficiencies present in the pleadings,” it said. But Reo maintains there are “no factual deficiencies” in the complaint and Allstate isn’t “entitled to dismissal with prejudice as a matter of law” because he stated plausible claims under the DPPA, CSPA and TSSA, it said.