Wilson v. TPH Paralegal: One Robotic "Zero, Two" Voicemail Is Enough to Hale a Canadian Caller Into Oregon

The Two-Word Call

The plaintiff alleged that on July 15, 2025, he got a call on his personal cellphone, which has an Oregon area code. The message was "generic and robotic" and said only "zero, two." He had never done business with the company and never consented. He brought suit on behalf of a class of individuals who had received prerecorded calls on cellphone numbers they never gave the defendant a wrong number class in plain English.

The Canadian company moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction and failure to state a claim, and to strike the class allegations. It lost on all three.

"We Called You by Accident" Is Not a Jurisdiction Defense

The company's main pitch was that it works only in Canada and "inadvertently left [Plaintiff] a voicemail one time." Its proof was a director's declaration about what an employee told the plaintiff's lawyer. The court noted that this did not actually establish the call was a mistake.

More importantly, it did not matter. Under the Calder effects test, the "intentional act" is the act of placing the call, not the intent to reach a particular person. The court borrowed the pistol analogy from Schwarzenegger v. Fred Martin Motor Co., 374 F.3d 797 (9th Cir. 2004): the act is pulling the trigger, not where the bullet lands. A rule shielding accidental conduct would make particularly little sense under the TCPA, which bans "any call" using a prerecorded voice regardless of accident.

The call was expressly aimed at Oregon because it went to an Oregon area code. The court leaned on Brainerd v. Governors of the University of Alberta, 873 F.2d 1257 (9th Cir. 1989), where a single phone call supported jurisdiction over a Canadian university. And on fairness, there was no other obvious forum, Oregon has an interest in protecting residents, and modern travel makes defending a simple claim less burdensome.

One Call Counts

The company argued a single short message was not actionable. The court pointed out that the statute covers "any call" and cited Susinno v. Work Out World Inc., 862 F.3d 346 (3d Cir. 2017), which found a single voicemail actionable. The allegations about the date, numbers, robotic tone, and generic content were plenty to plead a prerecorded voice.

Class Allegations Survive

The court refused to strike the class at the pleading stage. The definition was not fail-safe because membership turns on objective facts, and the defendant would still need to show emergency purposes or consent defenses failed. The company also argued the plaintiff's number was posted online and used as a "dummy number," making him atypical. The plaintiff swore it had been his primary personal cellphone for five years, and the court called the typicality fight premature.

The Takeaway

If you dial into the United States, you can be sued in the United States. Calling the wrong number by mistake is a TCPA risk, not a defense. Robocallers across the border should scrub numbers just as carefully as domestic ones.

Read the District of Oregon opinion in Wilson v. TPH Paralegal.