Judge awards $230K to woman who got 163 robocalls from Time Warner

NEW YORK, July 8 (UPI) -- A judge on Tuesday ordered Time Warner Cable to pay a Texas woman $229,500 for harassing her with 163 robocalls meant for another customer.

U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan said the cable company went too far when it continued making robocalls to Araceli King, of Irving, Texas, 153 of them even after she told the company they had the wrong number.

After getting 10 phone calls from the company between July and October 2013, King had a seven-minute phone conversation with a Time Warner representative, telling them the customer they were trying to call -- Luiz Perez -- did not use the mobile phone number she now has. The phone number had been reassigned to her by Sprint after Perez used it.

But Time Warner called King 153 more times, including 74 phone calls that came even after King filed a lawsuit in March 2014.

Hellerstein said Time Warner Cable's actions were "particularly egregious" and said the company didn't take the lawsuit seriously, so he tripled the penalty to $1,500 per phone call.

"Defendant harassed plaintiff with robocalls until she had to resort to a lawsuit to make the calls stop, and even then TWC could not be bothered to update the information in its ... system," the ruling said.

Araceli King v. Time Warner Cable