A British man lived out every phone-owner's dream and successfully sued telemarketers for wasting his time.
In fact, Richard Herman made the companies pay an invoice of £10 for every minute wasted. (Plus court fees).
Even though Herman was listed with the Telephone Preference Services, which is like the Do Not Call list in the U.S., he was getting call after call from telemarketers offering him accident compensation and payment protection insurance reimbursements. He hadn't had an accident or a PPI.
Herman told the Daily Mail that he was particularly perturbed when telemarketers disturbed his mid-afternoon snack: "Once I was out in the garden eating and picking raspberries and had the telephone with me in case the children called. I was sat in the sun enjoying myself but one of these blasted companies called me – it was infuriating."
Even more infuriating was the fact that even after waiting on hold to get transferred from an overseas call center to an office in the U.K., Herman's pleas to be taken off their lists went unanswered.
"I said to them, you need to stop calling me and, I said, if you keep calling me, I'll charge you £10 a minute for my time to be talking to you," Herman told the BBC. And that's what he did.
A Northampton court heard Herman's claims of harassment — along with his recordings of the calls — and awarded him the payment of £195 plus £25 court fees from the telemarketers.
This isn't the first time someone successfully sued telemarketers. In 2007, André-Tascha Lammé was awarded $6,000 from mortgage brokers who avoided his request to be on a do not call list.
See Herman's claim below:
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