How to Sue for Spam Calls: Evidence, Small Claims, and Damages

You can sue a company for spam calls under the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and most people do it themselves in small claims court. The statute pays $500 for every illegal call or text, with no requirement that you prove any actual loss, and a judge can triple that to $1,500 per call if the company knew it was breaking the law.¹ Twenty documented calls from the same outfit is a $10,000 case, or $30,000 if the conduct was willful. Here is how to figure out whether your calls qualify, build the evidence, file the suit, and collect.

Which Calls You Can Actually Sue Over

Not every irritating call is illegal. The TCPA reaches two main categories, and your case has to fit inside one of them.

The first is robocalls and prerecorded messages to your cell phone. Any call placed to a cell number using an automatic dialing system or a prerecorded or artificial voice requires your prior express consent.² If the call is a sales pitch, the consent has to be in writing and has to name the specific company doing the calling. A generic form that grants permission to unnamed “marketing partners” does not count.³

The second is the National Do Not Call Registry. Once your number has been on the registry for at least 31 days, telemarketers making sales calls to it are violating federal rules, because that is the window companies have to scrub new registrations from their call lists.⁴

Consent you gave earlier can be pulled back. The FCC has confirmed you can revoke by replying “stop” to a text, telling the caller verbally, sending an email, or leaving a voicemail, and the company then has ten business days to stop.⁵ Every call after that window is a clean violation.

Spam texts count. The FCC treats text messages as “calls” for TCPA purposes, so unsolicited marketing texts carry the same rules and the same $500 to $1,500 per violation.³ Include them in your call log.

Calls the Statute Does Not Reach

Several categories are exempt. Emergency calls, calls collecting a debt owed to the federal government, healthcare messages, calls from tax-exempt nonprofits, fraud alerts from financial institutions, and package delivery notifications all get carve-outs, each with tight frequency caps.⁶ The caps matter: a healthcare provider calling six times a day has blown past its exemption and is actionable again. Government debt collection calls are permitted even to cell phones.¹

The Autodialer Question

In Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, the Supreme Court held that a device qualifies as an “automatic telephone dialing system” only if it uses a random or sequential number generator to store or produce the numbers it dials. A company dialing from a stored customer list is not using an autodialer under that definition. This closes off the autodialer theory for a lot of cases, but the Court was explicit that the TCPA separately bans prerecorded and artificial voice calls no matter how the number was dialed.⁷ If your spam call was a recording, you still have a claim.

Build the Evidence First

A TCPA case lives or dies on documentation. Start collecting before you decide whether to sue.

Identify the Company

You cannot sue a phone number. You need the company’s legal name and a physical address where court papers can be served. Spammers hide behind spoofed caller IDs and vague brand names, so this takes work. Listen for any company name mentioned on the call, run reverse-lookup searches on the number, search the product being pitched, and if a live agent picks up, ask directly which company is calling and write down the answer.

Keep a Call Log

For every unwanted call or text, record the date, time, and phone number, whether the voice was prerecorded, what was being sold, and whether you spoke to a person. Screenshot your call history and every spam text. This log is your damages calculation.

Confirm Your Do Not Call Status

If you are claiming DNC violations, verify your number at donotcall.gov and save a dated screenshot.⁸ Your number needs to have been registered for at least 31 days before the calls came in, because that is the safe-harbor window telemarketers get to scrub their lists.⁴ Not registered yet? Register now and set a calendar reminder for 31 days later.

Save Any Revocation

If you once gave the company permission and then withdrew it, keep proof: screenshots of the “stop” text, the email, or notes on when you told them by phone. Every call more than ten business days after your revocation is a violation you can point to without any argument about consent.⁵

Send a Demand Letter

Before you file, send the company a demand letter. It is not required, but it sometimes produces a quick settlement, and it shows the judge you tried to resolve things.

State the dates and times of the calls, identify the provision violated (robocall or prerecorded voice to a cell without consent, DNC violation, calls after revocation), and demand a specific dollar amount based on the statutory damages. If you have 15 illegal calls, request $7,500 in standard damages or $22,500 if the conduct was willful, and give a 30-day deadline. Send it certified mail with return receipt requested. Keep copies of everything.

File in Small Claims Court

If the letter goes nowhere, sue. Small claims court is designed for people without lawyers, the procedures are stripped down, and the filing fee for claims under a few thousand dollars generally runs between about $30 and $75, higher for larger claims. Pick up the complaint form (sometimes labeled a Statement of Claim) from your local courthouse or its website. Enter the defendant’s legal name and address, describe the TCPA violations briefly, list the dates of the calls, and state the total damages you are seeking.

Small claims courts cap the amount you can sue for, and the cap varies widely by state — as low as $2,500 in some, as high as $25,000 in others. If your damages exceed your state’s cap, you can trim the claim to fit or file in a higher court, where the procedure is more involved and an attorney starts to make sense.

Watch for Arbitration Clauses

This is where a lot of TCPA cases die. If you have an existing account or relationship with the company, dig up the terms of service you agreed to. Many businesses bury mandatory arbitration clauses with class-action waivers in their sign-up agreements, and courts routinely enforce them to push TCPA cases out of the courtroom and into private arbitration. If the caller is a company you have no relationship with, there is no agreement for them to invoke, and this concern falls away.

Serving the Defendant

After filing you have to formally deliver the papers. Rules vary, but most courts allow service by a sheriff’s deputy or private process server, and many also accept certified mail. When the defendant sits in another state, which is common for telemarketing outfits, your state’s long-arm statute may still give your court jurisdiction over calls directed into the state. Cross-state personal service through a process server usually runs $50 to $200. Certified mail is much cheaper if your court allows it. The case cannot move until service is complete.

What You Can Recover

The statute has two damages tracks.

For robocall and prerecorded voice violations under Section 227(b), you recover $500 per call as a statutory minimum, or your actual losses if greater. If the court finds willful or knowing conduct, it can treble the award to $1,500 per call.¹ You do not have to prove the calls cost you money. Prove the violation and the $500 is automatic.

For Do Not Call Registry violations under Section 227(c), the statute allows up to $500 per violation, so a judge could award less than the full amount. Treble damages are also available for willful DNC violations. One important limit on the DNC track: the statute requires that you got more than one illegal call from the same entity within a 12-month period before you can bring a private suit.¹ A single call from a single company is generally not enough on its own, though you can still file an FCC complaint over it.

The math is straightforward. Twenty prerecorded sales calls from one company over three months is $10,000 standard, $30,000 if willful.

Expect to Pay Tax on the Money

TCPA awards are taxable. The IRS excludes lawsuit proceeds from income only when they compensate for physical injury or physical sickness, and statutory damages for unwanted calls do not qualify.⁹ Report the award as income for the year you receive it.

Statute of Limitations

The federal default for claims created by federal statute is four years, and most courts apply that window to TCPA private suits, running from the date of each illegal call. Some states have used shorter periods, so if you are sitting on older calls, check local rules and do not wait.

Getting Paid After You Win

A judgment is not a check. If the defendant ignores the order, you have to enforce it, which typically means garnishing bank accounts, placing a lien on real property the business owns, or getting a writ of execution that lets a sheriff seize business assets. Each step involves more paperwork and small fees.

Collection depends entirely on who you sued. A legitimate domestic company with a physical office and U.S. bank accounts is a realistic target. A fly-by-night operation running spoofed numbers from overseas usually is not. Before you invest filing fees and service costs, figure out whether the defendant has assets you can actually reach. When it does not, an FCC complaint at consumercomplaints.fcc.gov is the better use of your time; the agency does not award you money, but it tracks patterns and pursues enforcement against repeat offenders, and filing costs nothing.¹⁰

1
GovInfo. 47 USC 227 – Restrictions on Use of Telephone Equipment
2
eCFR. 47 CFR 64.1200 – Delivery Restrictions
3
Federal Register. Targeting and Eliminating Unlawful Text Messages, Implementation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991
4
Federal Trade Commission. Q&A for Telemarketers and Sellers About DNC Provisions in TSR
5
Federal Communications Commission. FCC 24-24 Report and Order – TCPA Consent Revocation
6
Federal Register. Limits on Exempted Calls Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991
7
Supreme Court of the United States. Facebook Inc. v. Duguid, 592 U.S. (2021)
8
Federal Trade Commission. National Do Not Call Registry
9
Internal Revenue Service. Tax Implications of Settlements and Judgments
10
Federal Communications Commission. Stop Unwanted Robocalls and Texts