A federal judge in Oregon has frozen a batch of lawsuits filed by one of the country's most prolific telephone-harassment litigants, while a defendant insurer digs into what it calls an "extortion scheme" built on manufactured wrong-number complaints.
U.S. District Judge Michael J. McShane on Wednesday declined to certify a class action brought by Chet Michael Wilson, a 44-year-old Eugene resident, against Freeway Insurance Services of America, and put a hold on a cluster of similar Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) suits Wilson has filed in the same court. The federal docket shows 14 Wilson-filed cases, including the Freeway matter, have been joined together for purposes of the certification fight. McShane also ordered Wilson and the Washington, D.C. law firm handling much of his litigation, Heidarpour Law Firm, to preserve every device and document connected to their telemarketing claims.
"I am concerned about the manner in which these cases are going to court," McShane said from the bench, adding that he was troubled about whether "criminal fraud" was taking place.
Wilson's number ends in 999-9999. He bought it for $1,000 and has used it since January 2024, according to Ryan Watstein, the attorney representing Freeway Insurance. Wilson says someone else submitted that number to the site usautoinsurancenow.com under the name "Dorianne Plageman" while requesting an auto quote, and that submission is what triggered marketing outreach from Freeway.
Freeway hired a former FBI agent to track down the woman named on the form. He came up empty, even after traveling to addresses in California and speaking with the manager of a mobile-home park where she reportedly once lived. In a separate Wilson suit against the MAH Group, the defense says Wilson admitted the IP address behind a similar sign-up was his own.
Once Freeway's lawyers signaled they planned to put fraud allegations on the record, Wilson and his counsel tried to voluntarily drop both the underlying suit and the certification bid. McShane refused to let them walk away, keeping the case open so the fraud claims could be tested through discovery.
Freeway's filings describe something bigger than one disgruntled consumer. Court records reviewed in the case put the number of TCPA suits Wilson has filed nationally at more than 80 since 2024; other legal-industry reporting puts the figure closer to 100. Watstein told the court that Freeway alone has spent roughly $500,000 defending itself, and that companies settling with Wilson typically hand over 90% to 95% of the payout to his lawyers rather than to Wilson himself. Under the TCPA's $500-to-$1,500-per-violation damages framework, that split can add up fast once a class is involved.
Other Oregon defendants caught up in Wilson's docket include PacifiCorp, Umpqua Health Alliance, Nationstar Mortgage, MAH Group and an AnyTime Fitness franchisor, according to court filings. Wilson's engagement agreement gives Heidarpour Law Firm power of attorney to pursue and settle "any and all" of his TCPA claims and to deposit settlement funds on his behalf, an arrangement Watstein says produced signature pages with no verification that Wilson ever reviewed them personally. Heidarpour, now represented by the New York firm Milbank LLP, has pushed back hard, calling Watstein's allegations "a campaign of serious but baseless accusations" and insisting it never resolves a claim without proper client authorization.
Freeway also questioned whether Wilson could ethically represent absent class members given a trail of racist and antisemitic social-media posts, including remarks praising Adolf Hitler, and more than a dozen bans from Facebook for hate speech and harassment. Wilson has said the posts reflected private political views he never intended for public consumption, and maintained he would represent Jewish, Black and LGBTQ class members fairly.
McShane wasn't buying that Wilson was a genuine victim of unwanted calls. Telling Wilson's attorney, Andrew Roman Perrong, that his client wasn't losing sleep over robocalls so much as celebrating them, the judge put it bluntly: "He's calling the law firm saying, 'Oh my god, I got a robocall! Cha-ching!'" according to reporting by Maxine Bernstein of The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Wilson's case is landing amid a run of TCPA suits against insurers. Insurance Business has covered several over the past year, among them a class action against Liberty Mutual alleging its purchased leads relied on fabricated consent data, a separate Liberty Mutual complaint over prerecorded sales calls, a challenge to expert testimony in a Humana robocall case, and a suit against an insurance marketer over allegedly spoofed sales calls. The Liberty Mutual lead-fraud allegations echo the theory Freeway is now pursuing against Wilson: that the consent behind a marketing call may never have come from a real customer at all.
None of this comes cheap. Insurance Business reported in 2023 that the average TCPA class-action settlement ran about $6.6 million, with defense costs adding another $2 million on top, and that many companies carrying this exposure were under-insured or not insured for it at all. Individual settlements since then have ranged widely: SiriusXM resolved a TCPA class action for $28 million in Campbell v. Sirius XM Radio Inc., and Keller Williams agreed to a $40 million deal covering related suits. A single compliance gap in a lead-buying or dialing campaign can outrun what most carriers budget for it.
A consent checkbox on a web form isn't proof that a real customer filled it out. Carriers that buy leads have reason to ask their vendors what they can actually verify about the person behind a submitted phone number, not just whether a disclosure was technically shown. It's also worth checking whether marketing partners run leads through third-party verification services, and what happens when those services can't confirm a name tied to a number. Liberty Mutual's own suit against its lead aggregator, All Web Leads, shows carriers are already pushing this risk back up the supply chain through indemnification and warranty language in lead-purchase agreements. E&O and cyber policies are worth a second look too, given how far TCPA settlement costs can swing.
Discovery in the Freeway Insurance case will now proceed, with the insurer expected to pursue sanctions against Wilson and his legal team once it has gathered enough evidence to support the motion.
