Glossary · Telemarketing & Privacy

Colorado Prevention of Telemarketing Fraud Act (PTFA): The Cell Number Listing Rule Behind a Wave of Lawsuits

By Steve Levine · Updated August 6, 2026 · 8 min read

Quick Answer

The Colorado Prevention of Telemarketing Fraud Act, or PTFA, is Part 3 of the Colorado Consumer Protection Act, C.R.S. §§ 6-1-301 to 6-1-306. Most of it is ordinary telemarketing regulation: register with the attorney general before selling by phone, give buyers a three-day cancellation right, do not run deceptive sales pitches. The part driving litigation right now is a single 2005 addition at § 6-1-304(4), which makes it unlawful to knowingly list a cellular telephone number in a directory for a commercial purpose without the owner's consent. Section 6-1-305 attaches a private lawsuit to that one provision, worth $300 to $1,000 per offense plus fees. Most of these cases are still pending with nothing to claim; the one exception so far is the People Data Labs settlement, which is taking Colorado claims through September 29, 2026.

On this page

What the PTFA is

The Colorado Prevention of Telemarketing Fraud Act is not a standalone law. It is Part 3 of Article 1 of Title 6 of the Colorado Revised Statutes — a block of six sections, §§ 6-1-301 through 6-1-306, sitting inside the Colorado Consumer Protection Act.

Its opening section is a legislative declaration, which is the legislature explaining why it bothered. The general assembly found that commercial solicitation by telephone was growing quickly, that it carried unique risks along with its benefits, and that fraudulent and deceptive phone selling had cost Colorado consumers — particularly elderly, homebound, and otherwise vulnerable ones — substantial money. Regulating the commercial use of the telephone, it concluded, protected both the public and the legitimate telemarketing industry.

For thirty-odd years that framing described the whole statute: a fraud law aimed at people who sell things over the phone. The provision now generating class actions was bolted on later, applies to conduct that has nothing to do with placing a call, and sat almost entirely unused until 2025.

What the Act regulates

Section 6-1-302 supplies the definitions the rest of the part runs on. A commercial telephone seller is, roughly, anyone who in the course of business causes a commercial telephone solicitation to be made, whether on their own behalf or someone else's, subject to a list of carve-outs — licensed securities sellers offering registered or exempt securities, certain retail businesses, and callers soliciting only from business customers who already bought the same or similar goods. A commercial telephone solicitation is an unsolicited call, live or automated, made to induce someone to buy or invest in goods, services, or property or to take an extension of credit, along with communications about gifts, prizes, awards, or price and availability claims that invite a phone response.

Section 6-1-303 is the registration regime. A commercial telephone seller cannot do business in Colorado without registering with the attorney general at least ten days beforehand. Individual employees of a registered seller do not each have to register. Applications carry a filing fee that the attorney general sets, capped by statute at $250 for a registration and $100 for a renewal. A seller that hires an outside telemarketing company does not escape the requirement by outsourcing the calls.

Section 6-1-304 lists the unlawful telemarketing practices. Among them: failing to let a buyer cancel a telephone sales purchase any time before three business days pass after the buyer receives the goods, services, or property, and failing to tell the buyer during the call that the cancellation right exists. The section also sweeps in any deceptive trade practice defined elsewhere in the Consumer Protection Act, and it says expressly that its list adds to, rather than replaces, whatever unfair-practice claims already exist at common law or under other Colorado statutes.

All of that is unremarkable. Then there is subsection (4).

The cell number listing provision

Effective September 1, 2005, § 6-1-304(4) added two more unlawful practices. One is using a scanning device or other electronic means to identify a cellular telephone number and then place a commercial telephone solicitation to that cell phone. The other — the one everything now turns on — is knowingly listing a cellular telephone number in a directory for a commercial purpose unless the person whose number it is gave affirmative consent to the listing, in writing, orally, or electronically. The subsection does not apply to a solicitation made in connection with a preexisting commercial relationship between the caller and the phone's owner.

Read narrowly, that is a rule about phone books: do not print somebody's mobile number in a commercial directory without asking. Read the way plaintiffs' firms are now reading it, it is something much larger, because the operative words are undefined and the sentence does not say who it binds.

The statute never defines "directory." It does not say a directory has to be a book, or a phone book, or anything published by a carrier. It does not limit the prohibition to commercial telephone sellers — the other operative sections say "commercial telephone seller," but this one says "a person." And "for a commercial purpose" is broad enough on its face to cover a searchable database that a company monetizes.

The claim built on that reading has four moving parts: the defendant listed a cellular number, in something that qualifies as a directory, knowingly, for a commercial purpose, and the number's owner never gave affirmative consent. Whether a people-search results page or a business-contact database is a "directory," and whether consent can be inferred from a number already circulating publicly, are exactly the questions no Colorado appellate court has answered.

What a PTFA claim pays

Section 6-1-305 carries the penalties, and it treats the listing provision differently from the rest of the Act.

For the Act generally, a commercial telephone seller who knowingly engages in an unlawful telemarketing practice commits a class 1 misdemeanor. That is a criminal exposure, prosecuted by the state, not something a consumer can bring.

For subsection (4), the statute creates a private civil action and gives it to the owner of the cellular telephone. The recovery is consequential damages, court costs, attorney fees, and a penalty of at least $300 and not more than $500 for a first offense, rising to at least $500 and not more than $1,000 for a second or subsequent offense.

Those are small numbers individually. They are not small when a database holds hundreds of thousands of Colorado cell numbers and every listing is argued to be its own violation, and the fee-shifting provision means a plaintiff's firm can fund the case. That arithmetic, plus the fact that no court had construed the provision, is the whole reason the clause was rediscovered. It is the same dynamic that made Washington's commercial email statute a magnet for filings — a dormant state law with per-violation statutory damages and attorney fees attached. Our explainer on the Washington CEMA email lawsuits covers that parallel.

The 2025–2026 litigation wave

Beginning in 2025, plaintiffs' firms started filing putative class actions built on the listing provision. Legal trade coverage in mid-2026 put the count in the dozens, with reporting describing close to thirty putative class actions filed over roughly a year and new ones appearing regularly. The first batch was filed in federal court in Colorado; those were voluntarily dismissed, and some were refiled elsewhere. Cases are now pending in Colorado, Washington, California, New York, Massachusetts, and Florida.

The defendants are mostly not telemarketers. They are companies that operate searchable databases of phone numbers: people-search sites, business-contact and sales-intelligence vendors, and lead-generation platforms. Companies named in filed complaints include Whitepages, BeenVerified, Datanyze, Zenleads, Infopay, and Lusha Systems. Each of these is an allegation in a pending case. No court has found any of them liable under the PTFA, and the companies dispute the claims.

The rulings so far are procedural rather than merits decisions. In a putative class action against Whitepages in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, No. 2:25-cv-00986-TL, Judge Tana Lin denied the company's motion to strike the class allegations on April 21, 2026, holding it was too early on the pleadings to say the claims could not be tried on a classwide basis; reporting on the ruling described the court as skeptical of the argument that the listing at issue was fully protected noncommercial speech. In January 2026 a federal court in the Central District of California denied a business lead-services defendant's motions to transfer the case to Colorado and to dismiss it. Neither decision decided whether the statute was violated.

Defendants are pressing a stack of challenges. The headline one is constitutional: that reading the provision to make cell numbers presumptively private turns it into a content-based restriction on speech that cannot survive First Amendment scrutiny. Others include standing — whether a listing alone is a concrete injury, an Article III standing question that has ended plenty of privacy cases — along with dormant Commerce Clause arguments about a state statute reaching nationwide databases, fail-safe class objections, and ordinary pleading challenges. Colorado and other states have filed an amicus brief in the Washington case defending the provision as a permissible regulation of commercial conduct.

The honest summary is that this is an open question working its way through several courts at once, and it could end with the provision read broadly, read narrowly, or struck down.

One defendant has now paid rather than wait for that answer. People Data Labs, Inc., a business-contact data vendor, agreed to a $6,362,167 settlement in Cochrane v. People Data Labs, Inc., No. 3:25-cv-09533-RFL (N.D. Cal.), which Judge Rita F. Lin preliminarily approved on June 30, 2026. It covers Coloradans whose inferred mobile number sat in the company's database and was disclosed at least once between September 2022 and March 3, 2026, and it is the first PTFA listing case to reach a claims process. PDL denies wrongdoing and the Court has not decided who is right, so the settlement resolves that lawsuit without resolving the legal question — but it does show the exposure is real enough that a defendant would rather buy peace than litigate the "directory" issue to judgment. The People Data Labs settlement page has the class definition, deadline and filing requirements.

PTFA vs. the TCPA vs. the Colorado no-call list

Three different regimes get confused with each other here, and only one of them is about listings.

The federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act governs the calls and texts themselves — autodialed and prerecorded calls to cell phones, marketing to numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry, and the like. It is the statute behind most of the telemarketing settlements that actually pay claims. If you got the calls, that is usually the law in play.

The Colorado No-Call List Act is Part 9 of the same consumer statute, §§ 6-1-901 to 6-1-908. It lets subscribers put a number on a state no-call list, makes soliciting a listed number a deceptive trade practice under § 6-1-105(1), and routes enforcement through the Consumer Protection Act's remedies and the attorney general, with the state's no-call program administered alongside the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. Registering on that list has no bearing on the PTFA listing provision, which asks only whether you consented to the listing.

The PTFA listing provision is about the number sitting in a database, not about anyone calling it. A plaintiff bringing that claim does not have to allege they received a single call. That is precisely what makes the theory unusual, and precisely what defendants say shows it is being stretched past what the legislature wrote.

What this means if you are reading about it

If you came here because you saw a headline about Coloradans being owed $500 for their phone number appearing on a people-search site, there is now exactly one thing to sign up for. The People Data Labs settlement is taking claims through September 29, 2026 from Coloradans identified in that one company's database, and filing requires the LoginID and PIN printed on the mailed notice. Every other case on this page is a pending lawsuit: no class certified, no fund, no administrator, no claim form. A claim form purporting to cover Whitepages, BeenVerified or any other named defendant is not describing a real process.

If you think your cell number has been listed and you want to know whether you have a claim, that is a question for a lawyer licensed in Colorado, not for a form on a website. The statute's private action belongs to the owner of the phone, and whether it reaches a particular database is unresolved.

If what you actually want is a telemarketing case you can claim money from today, those exist and they are mostly TCPA settlements — cases about calls and texts you received, with real deadlines and real payouts. The open settlements list is where those live.

And if you are on the receiving end of this as a business, the exposure is not limited to telemarketers. Any company that publishes or licenses a searchable set of phone numbers is inside the theory, whether or not it has ever placed a sales call.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a PTFA settlement I can file a claim for?

One, as of August 6, 2026. People Data Labs, Inc. agreed to a $6,362,167 settlement in Cochrane v. People Data Labs, Inc., which received preliminary approval on June 30, 2026 and is taking claims through September 29, 2026 from Coloradans whose inferred mobile number sat in the company's database. Every other PTFA listing case is still a pending lawsuit with no fund, no administrator, and no claim form. A site inviting you to sign up for a payout under Colorado's telemarketing law is describing the People Data Labs settlement or nothing at all.

How much is a PTFA claim worth?

Section 6-1-305 sets a penalty of at least $300 and not more than $500 for a first offense, and at least $500 and not more than $1,000 for a second or subsequent offense, payable to the owner of the cellular telephone, along with consequential damages, court costs, and attorney fees. What counts as one offense when a number sits in an online database for months is one of the questions courts have not answered.

Does the PTFA only apply to telemarketers?

The registration and sales rules in the Act apply to commercial telephone sellers. The listing provision is written more broadly: it says a person commits an unlawful telemarketing practice by knowingly listing a cellular telephone number in a directory for a commercial purpose without consent. That wording is why people-search sites, contact-data vendors, and lead-generation platforms have been named as defendants even though they do not place sales calls, and whether the provision truly reaches them is being contested.

Is the PTFA the same thing as the Colorado no-call list?

No. The no-call list comes from a separate part of the same consumer statute, the Colorado No-Call List Act at C.R.S. §§ 6-1-901 to 6-1-908, which lets subscribers register a number and makes soliciting a registered number a deceptive trade practice enforced through the Consumer Protection Act. The PTFA is Part 3, and its cell-number listing provision has nothing to do with whether you signed up for the no-call list.

Has any court ruled that the listing provision is valid?

No merits ruling had been located as of August 6, 2026. The decisions so far are procedural: a federal judge in Washington declined in April 2026 to strike the class allegations in a case against Whitepages, and a California federal court in January 2026 denied a lead-services defendant's motions to transfer and to dismiss. Defendants argue the provision violates the First Amendment, and Colorado and other states have filed an amicus brief defending it. Nothing is settled.

Does the PTFA apply if I do not live in Colorado?

The listing provision is a Colorado statute and the cases so far have been brought for people with Colorado connections, even where the lawsuit itself was filed in Washington, California, New York, Massachusetts, or Florida. How far a Colorado consumer statute reaches conduct outside the state is one of the defenses being raised, so the geographic scope is unsettled.



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