People who received automated calls from Molina Healthcare on a phone number that was never theirs could collect between $319 and $638 each, with no requirement to show proof of harm. The proposed class settlement in Kruzel v. Molina Healthcare, Inc., et al. (6:23-cv-01183), filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, resolves claims under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The case centers on robocalls placed to reassigned or wrong numbers, and the per-claimant payout range signals how seriously federal courts treat automated outreach that lands on the wrong line.
Molina’s wrong-number robocalls and the TCPA claim window
The core dispute is straightforward: Molina Healthcare, or vendors acting on its behalf, placed automated calls to phone numbers that had changed hands. The people who answered had no relationship with Molina and never consented to the calls. Under the TCPA, each unwanted robocall can carry statutory damages of $500, and willful violations can triple that figure to $1,500. The proposed settlement in this case compresses those statutory amounts into a $319-to-$638 range per claimant, reflecting the math of distributing a finite fund across all eligible class members.
What makes this settlement unusual is the absence of a documentation burden. Claimants do not need call logs, screenshots, or carrier records. The settlement structure treats the mere receipt of a misdirected robocall as sufficient grounds for payment. That design choice reflects a broader pattern in TCPA litigation: when a health plan or insurer uses automated dialing systems and fails to scrub reassigned numbers from its contact lists, courts have increasingly sided with recipients who had no way to prevent the calls.
The docket materials on GovInfo, published by the U.S. Government Publishing Office, confirm the case number and court. Full filings, including the operative complaint, settlement agreement, and any exhibits detailing Molina’s calling practices, are retrievable through the federal court records system maintained by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
Third-party dialers and the unanswered vendor question
A recurring thread in TCPA cases against large health plans is the role of third-party dialing vendors. When companies like Molina outsource automated outreach, responsibility for maintaining accurate phone lists often falls into a gap between the health plan and its contractor. The hypothesis that higher per-claimant awards correlate with documented use of outside dialers is testable in theory: cross-referencing PACER complaints against the same vendors in the same federal district could reveal whether courts impose steeper penalties when the chain of delegation is longer and oversight is thinner.
In this case, the public docket index does not include vendor contracts or declarations from Molina’s dialing partners. Those documents, if they exist, are likely filed as exhibits accessible only through the CM/ECF system behind the PACER login. Without them, the exact mechanism behind the wrong-number calls remains partially obscured. Did Molina’s vendor fail to check a reassigned-number database? Did the health plan supply outdated contact lists? The settlement resolves the legal claims without requiring a public answer to those operational questions.
