A Court Found a TCPA Plaintiff Requested the Calls He Sued Over. Here Is What Caught Him

What the court decided in Human v. Fisher Investments#

Judge Matthew Schelp of the Eastern District of Missouri held on 30 Sep 2026 that Daniel Human brought his TCPA case against Fisher Investments in complete bad faith (No. 4:24-cv-01177, Doc. 160, read 16 Oct 2026).

The order makes Human, his lawyer Edwin Butler, and Butler Law Group jointly and severally liable for every reasonable fee Fisher spent defending Human's claims. Fisher's fee record is due 22 October 2026.

On 31 March 2026, six months earlier, the court dismissed Human's claims and struck his answer to Fisher's fraud counterclaim as a sanction (Doc. 148, 351 F.R.D. 225). The counterclaim is still open.

• The court's own summary, in Doc. 160: the genesis of this entire action was Human's fraud. He gave his phone number with a fake name to request solicitations from Fisher, for the sole purpose of suing under the TCPA after Fisher called.
• The award covers fees Fisher would not have paid but for Human's bad-faith filing. Under Goodyear v. Haeger (2017) it has to be compensatory, so the ordinary cost of prosecuting Fisher's counterclaim stays with Fisher.
• Butler and his firm asked the court on 12 October 2026 to narrow the award as to them, arguing Butler did not file the original petition and only appeared on 11 October 2024 (Doc. 166). That motion was pending when we read the docket.

How Human set up the claim against Fisher#

Human filed more than 65 civil actions between April 2024 and April 2025, nearly all under the TCPA, according to the court's March opinion, which counted them from his own bankruptcy schedule.

His usual move was to file pro se in Missouri state court, where many defendants settled fast without admitting anything. Doc. 160 says dozens of prior defendants settled. Fisher refused.

Fisher's counterclaim, filed 5 February 2025, alleges that in June 2024 Human or someone acting for him entered the name Veronica Moreno and his own number on a lead form at smartasset.com, then clicked submit.

• Per the counterclaim, the form gave express written consent to marketing calls and texts from SmartAsset and Fisher Investments at the number entered. Human then sued both for calling a number on the Do Not Call Registry.
• Fisher pleaded consent in its first answer and set out the fake-name theory in the joint scheduling plan. Human deleted that paragraph from Fisher's section of the plan, the court noted in March.
• Two other companies formally accused Human of the same method in federal court in 2023, and Butler represented him in both. Both cases settled, the court noted.

The evidence that exposed the Fisher Investments claim#

Fisher's forensic examiner inspected Human's phone on 27 January 2025. It had received texts addressed to at least a dozen different names and hardly any addressed to Human himself (Doc. 148, citing Doc. 66-3).

The examiner said he had analyzed data from thousands of phones and had never seen one receiving messages addressed to more than a dozen people. The court found that fit Fisher's fake-name theory exactly.

Human brought a laptop that looked unused since 2022, per the examiner. His desktop, used for his TCPA cases, went in the trash less than 48 hours before the inspection. He admitted it in court on 28 March 2025.

• IP address: in the 2023 case Human v. STL Design & Build, the company alleged it had the IP address of the visitor who entered his number on its site, and attached a URL certificate plus a reverse lookup tying that IP to Human.
• Silence: at his deposition on 4 June 2025 Human invoked the Fifth Amendment dozens of times, including on how he started bringing TCPA suits. The court drew an adverse inference.
• Volume: the court said the sheer number of suits was itself indicative of fraud, and that it should have made his lawyer question his story.

Why many of Human's targets settled instead#

Fisher Investments won, but read the calendar before you treat the outcome as cheap. The fight ran from a state-court petition in July 2024 to a fee schedule still open in October 2026.

The win also turned on spoliation, a destroyed computer, more than on a trial of the consent question. A plaintiff who keeps his devices and answers questions leaves the defendant arguing over the lead record alone.

So the lead record is the asset. A team that can show who submitted the form, from where, when, and what they agreed to has a defense to argue. A team that cannot has a settlement to negotiate.

What a lead record should hold for every form fill#

Human v. Fisher Investments shows which facts carried weight: the name as typed, the number, the device, the IP address and the consent text. The list below is our read of that record, not a rule the court wrote.

Keep each item per submission, not per campaign, and keep it with the contact in your CRM so the person answering a demand letter can find it in minutes.

• The name and number exactly as entered, even when the name looks wrong. Fisher's case started with a name that did not belong to the number.
• Timestamp, IP address and the page URL of the form. The 2023 STL Design & Build counterclaim attached a URL certificate showing the IP address and a reverse lookup tying it to Human.
• The consent text as displayed, its version, and every seller it named. Fisher's form named SmartAsset and Fisher Investments, which is why the counterclaim could say consent ran to Fisher.
• The lead source. Fisher's counterclaim alleges the lead came through SmartAsset, which it calls an independent contractor vendor. Ask any lead vendor for the submission record per lead, not a summary.
• The first outbound message and the first reply, with times. Those show what the person did after asking to be contacted.

Make the first text to an inbound lead a record too#

Inbound leads reward speed, and the first text is also the cleanest place to confirm who asked. Name the person, the company and the request in one line, then ask one question.

Hi Dana, Sam at Northpoint. You asked for pricing on our site at 9:40 this morning. Is this the best number for a 10 minute call today or tomorrow?

A reply of wrong person or who is this is an answer worth having on day one. Stop, log it against the lead record, and do not text that number again on that lead.

• A first line that names the form gives a real lead an easy reason to reply, and gives you a dated record of what you said. A generic opener gives neither.
• Route repeats for review: one number tied to several different names echoes what Fisher's examiner found on Human's phone, messages addressed to more than a dozen people.
• Honor a stop the moment it arrives. The opt-out rules are at /blog/who-keeps-your-opt-out-record.

Where Blue Reacher sits in this#

Blue Reacher sends over iMessage, so no A2P registration is required. That is a carrier-registration fact, and it changes nothing about consent law or the Do Not Call rules.

Messages send from your CRM, so the reply and the opt-out land on the same contact record that holds the lead source and form data your team already captures.

We are a vendor in this category. Nothing here is legal advice, and every citation is dated so your counsel can check it against the docket.

• Pacing is published: no total daily message cap, replies are never metered, and new conversations pace at 50 opted-in or 30 cold new contacts per line per day.

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