The Northern District of California recently let most of a plaintiff’s TCPA claims survive a motion to dismiss, a timely reminder of the federal courts’ plausibility standard. The case is Koeller v. TD Synnex Corp., No. 26-1102, 2026 WL 1963045 (N.D. Cal. July 7, 2026).
According to the plaintiff, he had placed his phone number on the National Do-Not-Call Registry. Despite that registration, he allegedly received telemarketing calls between January and February 2026 from callers who identified themselves as representing TD Synnex and who were trying to sell endpoint security products. He alleged that he told the first caller that his number was on the Do-Not-Call Registry and asked not to be contacted again, but TD Synnex representatives called him two more times anyway. He filed suit under the TCPA.
TD Synnex challenged Mr. Koeller’s standing, the plausibility of his claims under Rule 12(b)(6), and his request for injunctive relief.
On the issue of standing, the court found that Mr. Koeller had plausibly alleged that the calls were attributable to TD Synnex, as the complaint alleged that the callers identified themselves as being “from TD Synnex.” And, having sufficiently pleaded attributability, he had also stated a claim that was redressable by the court. That same allegation also led the court to reject the Rule 12(b)(6) defense, finding that it made Mr. Koeller’s “direct liability” claim plausible. In doing so, the court distinguished cases in which plaintiffs were found not to have plausibly alleged “direct liability” because they either did not allege that the defendant made the calls directly (versus through an intermediary) or did not state any non-conclusory fact to make the “direct liability” claim plausible.
TD Synnex did succeed on one point, though. Mr. Koeller had also asked the court to enjoin TD Synnex from calling him again in the future. The court found that three calls over roughly two weeks did not show a strong enough likelihood of repeated future harm to justify that kind of forward-looking relief. As a result, the court dismissed Mr. Koeller’s request for injunctive relief, though it gave him the chance to fix the issue by amending his complaint.
