$130K to $4.8 million: what auto dealers paid to settle over marketing texts

A Florida Toyota store agreed this year to an $889,525 class settlement over one specific claim: that it kept texting customers after they opted out.¹ Court records put the payout at up to $85 per text for more than 1,800 people.

Not a manufacturer. One store.

I want to walk through five of these cases, because dealers hear "compliance" and their eyes glaze over. Mine did too, for years. Then I started reading the actual settlements, and I noticed the businesses writing the checks looked a lot less like Fortune 500 companies and a lot more like the stores I spent my career in.

The short version of the rules we build against: federal law (the TCPA) and state laws like Florida's FTSA let consumers sue over telemarketing texts and calls sent without proper consent, with statutory damages that run per message and can be trebled when conduct is willful.² We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. It is the reason the records below exist.

What the settlements look like

Business	Year	What was claimed	Reported amount
Grieco Ford of Fort Lauderdale	2018	Unsolicited robocalls and texts3	$4.8 million
Moss Bros. Auto Group (CA)	2022	Prerecorded telemarketing messages without express written consent4	$2.5 million
Toyota of North Miami	2025-26	Texts sent after customers opted out1	$889,525
Classic Chevrolet + 8 OK dealerships	2020	Telemarketing texts without consent, incl. numbers on the DNC registry5	$850,000
JK Buick GMC (IL)	2024	Texts sent after customers asked them to stop6	$130,000

Each of these settled. None of the dealers admitted wrongdoing, and settling is not a finding of liability. The dollar figures are as publicly reported in court records and legal-industry coverage, cited below.

Look at the range for a second: $130,000 to $4.8 million. A single-point Buick store in Illinois is on this list next to a big Florida Ford operation. Size is not the filter.

What do these cases have in common?

Three of the five involve the same claim: messages that kept coming AFTER somebody said stop.

That detail matters more than any dollar figure, because it tells you where the real failure lives. It is not the first text that gets a store in trouble. It is the follow-up system that has no reliable memory of who opted out, so the next campaign, the next salesperson, the next tool in the stack sends message number eleven to somebody who quit at message three.

Two other details from the records are worth your attention.

In the Moss Bros. case, the settlement class covered messages sent by the dealer group's employees, agents, AND third party contractors.⁴ In the Oklahoma case, the class definition specifically included texts sent through the dealerships' texting vendor.⁵ Read those together and the lesson is plain: when a vendor sends on your behalf, the messages are treated as yours.

How we built for this

I am not going to lecture anybody about regulations. That conversation belongs to your attorney. What I can tell you is what we built, because we read these cases before we ever sent a message for anyone.

Every message in our system has to clear five checks before it can leave:

1. Documented consent - a written record that names the store, verified before we send.
2. DNC and reassigned-number scrub - in case the number changed hands since the record was created.
3. Quiet hours - the customer's local time, held to the most restrictive state's calling window. Never Sundays or holidays.
4. Frequency cap - a hard ceiling on messages per day, on any subject.
5. No opt-out on record - any "stop," in any words, is permanent. "Don't text me" counts. "Wrong number" counts.

Fail one, the message dies. There is no override and no "probably fine" pile.

The reason is sitting in that table. The most common claim in these cases is the one our fifth check exists to kill: a message sent after somebody opted out. Our suppression list never expires, and it survives every campaign, every export, and every tool change. If a question ever comes up, it resolves as a records question. We hold the records.

You can see the whole system, including what we refuse to send, on our compliance page.

Questions dealers ask about this

Are you saying my store is breaking the law?
No. We do not know your store, and we do not give legal opinions. We are showing you the public record of what other stores paid to settle claims, and what we built so those claims can never be about a message we sent.

We only text our own customers. Doesn't that make it safe?
The stores in that table were texting their own customers too. In the Oklahoma case the court filings note that an existing business relationship did not exempt anyone from the consent claims.⁵ Your relationship with the customer and your documentation of consent are two different things.

Our texting vendor says they handle compliance. Isn't that their problem?
Ask them one question: if a claim lands, whose name is on it? In two of the five cases above, the class definitions swept in messages sent by vendors and contractors on the dealer's behalf.^{4, 5} We planned for that answer, which is why every check above produces a record we can hand you.

What happens when one of your messages gets a "STOP"?
That number goes on a suppression list that never expires. Any wording counts, not just the word STOP. We also pass every opt-out back to you for your store's own records, so your list stays clean no matter who sends for you next. It is the fifth check, and it is the one we are most rigid about, because it is the claim that shows up most often in that table.

Does being this careful cost deals?
It costs messages, not deals. A text that dies at the gate was a text to somebody who could not say yes anyway. When a lead who can say yes responds, we book a call back from your sales team, usually inside the hour.

The honest close

Nobody buys follow-up help because of court records. You buy it because your CRM is full of paid-for leads nobody is working.

But when you pick who does that work, the table above is the difference between vendors. Anyone can send texts. The question is whether every message that goes out under your store's name can survive somebody asking, later and under oath, "show me the consent, show me the opt-out list, show me the records."

Ours can. That was the design requirement.

Sources

1. Karpiel v. FRL Automotive LLC (d/b/a Toyota of North Miami), Fla. 11th Jud. Cir., No. 2025-020201-CA-01. Settlement received preliminary court approval Nov. 24, 2025. ClassAction.org, with complaint and approval documents.
2. 47 U.S.C. § 227 (TCPA); Fla. Stat. § 501.059 (FTSA). Cited for existence, not interpretation. Consult counsel.
3. Automotive News, "Florida dealership settles robocall suit for $4.8 million" (Dec. 2018): autonews.com
4. Johnson v. Moss Bros. Auto Group, Inc. (C.D. Cal.), final approval June 24, 2022. Orrick InfoBytes, with order and complaint PDFs.
5. Jennifer King v. Classic Chevrolet Inc., et al., No. 4:19-cv-00429-CVE-JFJ (N.D. Okla.), final approval Oct. 14, 2020. Top Class Actions settlement record.
6. Quinn v. JK Buick GMC Inc., No. 1:23-cv-00447 (N.D. Ill.). Top Class Actions settlement record.

Settlement figures are as publicly reported and reflect agreements at various stages of court approval. Settlements are not admissions or findings of liability. This article describes LeadCentrix's own practices and is not legal advice.