He was on the Do Not Call list since 2021. The lender called anyway, looking for someone else
A Wisconsin bank's mortgage cold calls have landed it in a proposed class action - and the man leading it says he never handed over his number.
Asher Bronstin sued Ixonia Bank, which operates as Novus Home Mortgage, on May 30, 2026, in federal court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. The suit accuses the lender of violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the 1991 federal law that polices telemarketing. According to the filing, the bank called Bronstin to pitch a mortgage even though his number had been on the National Do Not Call Registry since November 4, 2021, and he had never agreed to hear from the company.
The sequence, as the lawsuit lays it out, is short and pointed. Between October and December 2024, Bronstin received at least four calls from one number. He missed three - on October 29, October 30, and December 9, 2024 - and answered the fourth on December 10. The filing says the agent told him she was selling a mortgage and was looking for a "Wayne Howard," not Bronstin. She passed him to a second Novus Home Mortgage agent, who tried to sell him a mortgage. Follow-up emails from that agent, the suit says, confirmed the bank had been the caller. Bronstin says he never did business with the lender and never knowingly gave it his number.
There is a second claim worth a careful read. The lawsuit alleges the calls did not pass along the caller's name through caller ID, which the TCPA requires. Bronstin's lawyer checked the calling carrier's records, the filing says, and the caller name field returned "COLLEGE PARK MD" rather than the bank's name. The law, according to the suit, requires a telemarketer's calls to carry a name the recipient can use to identify the caller and ask to be left alone.
Bronstin wants to stand in for two nationwide groups: people who got more than one telemarketing call from or on behalf of the bank while their numbers sat on the registry, and people whose calls failed to transmit proper caller ID. He puts the size of those groups in the hundreds, at minimum.
Then there is the price tag. The TCPA sets statutory damages of up to $500 a call, rising to as much as $1,500 a call where a court finds the conduct willful or knowing. The filing calls the bank's violations "negligent, willful, or knowing," asks the court to triple the damages, seeks an order halting the calls, and requests attorneys' fees.
For anyone running an outbound mortgage campaign, the lesson is direct. One misdirected dialing effort - even a wrong-number call - can grow into a class action when the targets were on the Do Not Call list and the caller ID was wrong. Scrubbing lists against the registry and making sure your outbound name actually shows up are not housekeeping. They are what keeps a marketing push from turning into a courtroom.
None of this has been tested in court. Ixonia Bank has not yet responded, and no judge has ruled on the claims.
