Dish Network’s illegal calls to 18,000 phone numbers were sufficiently willful to warrant tripling a jury’s $20 million award, a federal court held May 22 (Krakauer v. Dish Network LLC, 2017 BL 170191, M.D.N.C., 1:14-CV-333, 5/22/17).
Dish’s agent, Satellite Systems Network, made 50,000 marketing calls to numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry. Dish described the harm caused by the calls only a “minor nuisance” and “inconvenient.”
“Dish’s description has left out ‘illegal,’ not to mention ‘infuriating,’” Judge Catherine C. Eagles wrote for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.
A jury awarded ...