There are few corporate entities that Americans hate more than cable companies, and Time Warner Cable is routinely the most despised among them. But still, the travails of Araceli King are extreme.
She received 153 automated telephone calls from the company over a span of less than a year, and they weren’t even meant for her, but for a man who previously had her mobile phone number.
Reuters reports that the robo-calls to King, even after she pleaded with the company to stop calling her, will cost Time Warner $229,500 in fines—that’s $1,500 per call—under a ruling from a federal judge in Manhattan yesterday. District judge Alvin Hellerstein said “a responsible business” would have tried harder to remedy the issue.
Time Warner Cable will have to do better than that if it wants to climb out of the basement of US customer satisfaction rankings. A spokesman told Quartz last month that it is ”striving every day to make TWC the most reliable, best-value choice everywhere we serve”—but errant robo-calls are still apparently on the to-do list.
“We are reviewing the ruling and our options to determine how we are going to proceed,” a Time Warner Cable spokesperson said in an email to Quartz.