Class Action Alleges Defendant Uses SMS ‘Blaster’ to Inundate Recipients With Texts

Blackstone Medicial Services, a company that provides in-home sleep testing for apnea and other sleep disorders, inundated plaintiff Layla Wiederkeher’s cellphone with text messages to collect a $171 debt she didn’t owe, alleged her Telephone Consumer Protection Act class action Thursday (docket 2:24-cv-02082) in U.S. District Court for Central California in Los Angeles. Despite Wiederkeher’s multiple responses to “stop,” Blackstone continues to send her the unwanted text messages to the present day, said her complaint. Based on the "content and format" of the text messages, Wiederkeher alleges that they were sent using Blackstone’s SMS “blaster,” which qualifies as a prohibited automatic telephone dialing system as defined under the TCPA, it said. Blackstone’s automated text messaging system “has the capacity to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator,” it said. Wiederkeher’s counsel has studied the code used “to program other similarly-functioning autodialers in the past, with the assistance of software engineers fluent in Java,” said the complaint. He found that such autodialers, when used in automated mode, “execute code that relies upon random or sequential number generation to both store and produce numbers to be dialed by the dialer,” it said. Text blasting systems work by relying on random or sequential number generators “to instruct the data set to produce telephone numbers to the dialer,” said the complaint. Without that key component, a dialing campaign “would require an agent to manually place the call, through organic decision making,” it said. Without discovery, Wiederkeher won’t be able to demonstrate whether the code for Blackstone’s dialing system contains such random or sequential number generators, it said. Wiederkeher makes these allegations on information and belief based on the volume of text messages she received, “and the fact that all the messages were of a prewritten one-size-fits-all form requiring only minimal customized inputs to the recipient,” it said.