A California woman is suing an avatar, more precisely, an Armonk-based insurance company, for allegedly pestering her with robocalls.
Terri Nichols accused Lumico Life Insurance Co. of violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, in a class action lawsuit filed Aug. 10 in U.S. District Court White Plains.
She claims that many people have received the calls and have been harmed by the “aggravation, nuisance and invasion of privacy that necessarily accompanies the receipt of unsolicited and harassing telephone calls.”
Lumico is affiliated with Swiss Re AG, a $21.6 billion international insurance conglomerate whose American operations are based in Armonk.
Lumico offers accidental death, life, and Medicare supplement insurance products that are positioned in the market as affordable and easy to obtain.
Nichols, of Santa Clara, California, says that on March 30 her home phone number was listed on the National Do Not Call Registry, the Federal Trade Commission service that bars most telemarketers from calling phone numbers.
When she answered her phone on May 11, according to the complaint, an “artificial avatar began asking her a series of questions about life insurance policies, her age, and her health.”
Then she was transferred to an actual person, a Lumico senior consultant who was selling life insurance policies.
The same thing allegedly happened on the following day, but this time a Lumico agent was selling burial benefits (Final Expense insurance, in Lumico”™s parlance).
Both calls, the complaint states, used artificial or prerecorded voices.
The FTC prohibits most prerecorded calls unless the recipient has granted written authorization for the calls. Nichols claims she has never used Lumico”™s services and never consented to receiving such calls.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of everybody in the U.S. who has received robocalls from Lumico on their landlines or cellular phones in the past four years and everybody who has received at least two telemarketing calls from Lumico within a year after their phone numbers were added to the Do Not Call Registry.
The complaint seeks penalties of $500 to $1,500 for each call that violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
Lumico”™s media relations department stated, “We cannot comment on an ongoing lawsuit,” in response to a message asking for its side of the story.
The White Plains case is the fifth telemarketing case Nichols has filed this year, according to federal court records, including complaints filed in Florida and California.
She is represented by Manhattan attorney Yitchak Kopel of Bursor & Fisher P.A., a national firm that has filed many class action lawsuits, including telemarketing cases.
The other nuisances are related to Robofaxing. They completely disregard unsubscribes even after repeated calls to stop. They send from different fax numbers each time so they can’t be blocked.