TCPA Litigation Is Rising Fast, and Outbound-Heavy Niches Sit Inside It
TCPA lawsuit volume climbed sharply through 2025. In the first four months of the year, 880 TCPA lawsuits were filed, a 44% increase year over year. By September 2025, year-to-date filings had reached 2,128, up more than 50% year over year, and 78% of that September's filings were class actions rather than individual claims. None of that filing data is merchant-services-specific. It describes the litigation environment any telemarketing-heavy niche is operating inside right now, and merchant services, where door-to-door, cold calling, and third-party appointment vendors are still the core prospecting mix, sits squarely in it.
The On-Point Case: Walston v. National Retail Solutions, Inc.
This is the case worth reading closely, because the defendant is not a generic telemarketer, it is a company selling the exact product category this page is about. National Retail Solutions, Inc., which does business as NRS Pay and sells merchant and POS services to small retailers, settled a TCPA class action for up to $6,510,240, or up to $135 per class member. The allegations: NRS Pay sent unauthorized prerecorded "ringless voicemail" telemarketing calls, delivered via a service called VoiceLogic, to consumers' cell phones, from January 8, 2020 through the date of final settlement approval.
The case is Walston v. National Retail Solutions, Inc., No. 24-cv-00083. Preliminary approval was granted January 14, 2026, the claims deadline is April 14, 2026, and the final approval hearing is scheduled for June 30, 2026. Every figure and date here comes from classaction.org's settlement coverage.
Why This Case Matters More Than a Generic TCPA Headline
Most TCPA coverage a merchant-services agent runs into is about telemarketing in general, insurance robocalls, debt-collection scripts, political texting. This one is different. NRS Pay sells the same category of product this niche sells: POS and merchant processing services to small retail businesses. A company built to reach exactly the buyer a merchant-services agent is trying to reach ended up as the defendant in a multi-million-dollar class settlement over how it reached them. That is not a cautionary tale from an unrelated industry. It is the closest thing to a direct precedent this research found anywhere in the niche.
SMS Carries the Same Consent Rules as Calls
This is the point worth slowing down on given how much outreach in this space is shifting toward text. TCPA consent requirements apply to SMS sent to a wireless number the same way they apply to a phone call. Texting is not a lower-risk workaround for a shop trying to avoid the compliance overhead of cold calling or ringless voicemail. If a channel reaches a wireless number without documented, verifiable consent, it carries litigation exposure whether the message arrives as a call, a voicemail drop, or a text.
That distinction is built into how VA Horizon runs its own merchant services outreach. Every conversation happens over SMS between a Human + AI SDR and a prospect, on the VA Horizon Private CRM, and the full exchange is preserved as a transcript. The channel being text-based does not exempt it from consent rules, it changes what the defensible record looks like, and a retrievable transcript is a materially stronger record than a verbal claim of consent ever is.
Broader FTC Attention on the Payments Space
NRS Pay's settlement is not an isolated data point. The FTC has continued enforcement activity elsewhere in payments: Paddle.com paid a $5 million settlement in June 2025 and was permanently banned from processing payments for tech-support telemarketers, over enabling deceptive schemes through merchant-of-record accounts. That case is less directly on-topic (it involves tech-support fraud routed through a merchant-of-record structure, not ISO agent calling), but it shows the FTC has not stepped back from scrutinizing this space.
Separately, per FTC announcement coverage, First American Payment Systems was the subject of an FTC action that secured more than $2.6 million in refunds to small businesses over surprise exit fees, described in that coverage as "zombie charges." The primary FTC page for that action was not directly accessible during this research, so treat the exact figure as reported through FTC announcement coverage rather than a direct-fetch-verified number, and confirm it against ftc.gov before citing it as a standalone fact elsewhere.
What a Defensible Consent Record Actually Needs
Given the filing volume above, an assumed or verbal consent posture is a weak position if a complaint or suit arrives. What holds up is a specific, retrievable record: when consent was given, for what kind of contact (call, voicemail drop, or text), and from what number. A shop that can produce that record for a specific contact is in a fundamentally different position than one that can only assert its process was compliant in general.
Questions to Ask About Any Outbound Program You Run or Buy
- Do you have a specific, dated consent record for every number your team or vendor contacts, or only a general belief the list was sourced compliantly?
- If your outreach includes SMS, does the consent record specifically cover text messages, not just calls or voicemail drops?
- Do you scrub against Do Not Call status before contact, and can you show when that scrub last ran?
- If you outsource outreach, can the vendor produce a specific consent record on request, not just a general compliance claim?
- Given a settlement like NRS Pay's reaching into the millions, does your current contact volume and list quality justify the exposure you are carrying?
What this means for you
- NRS Pay, a merchant/POS services company, settled a TCPA class action for up to $6,510,240 over unauthorized prerecorded ringless voicemail calls. It is the strongest on-point precedent in this niche, not a generic warning from an unrelated industry.
- Industry-wide TCPA filings hit 880 in the first four months of 2025 (up 44% YoY) and passed 2,128 year-to-date by September 2025, with 78% of that month's filings as class actions.
- TCPA consent rules apply to SMS the same way they apply to calls. Moving outreach to text does not remove the consent requirement, it changes what a defensible record looks like.
- A specific, dated, retrievable consent record beats a general claim of compliance every time a complaint or suit arrives.
Sources
The external data in this guide draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- classaction.org, NRS Pay TCPA settlement coverage (Walston v. National Retail Solutions, Inc.)
- ActiveProspect, TCPA lawsuits explode in 2025
- CompliancePoint, TCPA lawsuits on the rise in 2025
- natlawreview.com, payment processor to pay millions to settle FTC allegations