Ringless voicemail — a marketing technique that delivers prerecorded voice messages directly to a consumer’s voicemail inbox without ringing the phone — is generating a fresh wave of class-action lawsuits under the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). Two recent cases in 2026 show just how expensive the technique has become for businesses that don’t have proper consent in place.
$6.5 million settlement for a tech company
National Retail Solutions (NRS), a point-of-sale technology provider for independent retailers, has agreed to pay more than $6.5 million to resolve a TCPA class action alleging it used ringless voicemail technology to market its services without the consent the law requires.
The settlement class is limited to consumers who received messages sent through a single ringless voicemail provider — yet it still contains more than 50,000 class members. Each is set to receive approximately $100 or more from the settlement fund.
The case is notable not because the technology was unusual, but because it was so ordinary. NRS used a commercially available ringless voicemail tool the way many businesses do — as a low-cost, high-deliverability outreach channel — without the kind of consent records the TCPA demands for a prerecorded marketing message.
Small businesses are not immune
A second case making waves involves a Las Vegas realtor who used the GoHighLevel marketing platform to send ringless voicemails to owners of expired real-estate listings. A federal court certified a TCPA class action against her, finding the voicemails qualified as prerecorded calls under the statute and that she had no documentation of consent from the class members.
The practical takeaway: TCPA exposure scales with campaign volume, not company size. A single-agent business running a high-volume ringless voicemail campaign can face the same statutory damages as a national corporation. With statutory penalties of $500 to $1,500 per call, the financial risk for any small business can quickly become existential.
Why courts keep ruling against ringless voicemail
The Federal Communications Commission settled the regulatory question in 2022. In a Declaratory Ruling, the FCC held that ringless voicemails to wireless phones are ‘calls’ under the TCPA because they use an artificial or prerecorded voice. That places them squarely within the statute’s most restrictive consent rules, which require prior express written consent for marketing communications.
Courts have followed the FCC’s lead consistently. A 2025 federal decision in Taylor v. Kit Insurance held that allegations that voicemails were identical across recipients are enough, by themselves, to plausibly allege a prerecorded call — meaning a plaintiff can survive a motion to dismiss with little more than the messages themselves.
What businesses should do
Companies that use or are considering ringless voicemail as part of their marketing or outreach strategy should take several steps:
— Confirm that every recipient has provided prior express written consent specifically for prerecorded marketing voice messages on the wireless phone receiving the voicemail.
— Maintain documented, time-stamped, source-traceable consent records that can be produced in litigation or in response to a regulator’s request.
— Scrub recipient lists against the National Do Not Call Registry and the company’s own internal do-not-call list before each campaign.
— Honor opt-outs across all systems and all outbound channels — not just the channel on which the opt-out was received.
For businesses that depend on phone or text outreach — from local service providers to national brands — basic list hygiene has become a core compliance step. TCPALitigatorList.com provides an industry database of known TCPA litigators and serial plaintiffs that companies can use to screen call and text lists before they dial. Catching a handful of high-risk numbers up front is a far cheaper alternative than defending a class action after the fact.
The bigger compliance picture
The NRS settlement and the GoHighLevel case are part of a much larger surge in TCPA class-action filings. More TCPA class actions have been filed in the first quarter of 2026 than in any quarter in history. Plaintiffs’ attorneys are increasingly sophisticated, marketing platforms are increasingly powerful, and the cost of getting consent wrong is increasingly high.
For businesses that depend on outbound marketing to drive growth, the ringless voicemail wave is a reminder that there are no quiet channels left. Every form of outbound contact — call, text, voicemail — carries the same compliance burden, and the same risk if that burden isn’t met.
Sources
National Law Review: $6.5M Ringless Voicemail Settlement
TCPAWorld: GoHighLevel Realtor RVM Class Action
FCC: Ringless Voicemails Subject to TCPA