In Ananthapadmanabhan v. BSI Financial Services, Inc., 2015 WL 8780579, at *4 (N.D.Ill. 2015), Judge Leinenweber held that a TCPA Plaintiff must plead more than formulaic recitation of the TCPA in order to prove the “use” of an ATDS.
The Court agrees that Plaintiffs’ Complaint is insufficient. Use of an ATDS and the pre-recorded nature of the messages are not legal conclusions, they are facts. Still, when a fact is itself an element of the claim, as is the case here, it is not sufficient to recite that fact verbatim without other supporting details. A plaintiff must supply enough additional, independent facts “to raise a reasonable expectation that discovery will reveal evidence” of the alleged misconduct. Twombly, 550 U.S. at 556. Plaintiffs provide no information about the calls they received from BSI beyond vague statements about their content. (See, e.g., Compl. ¶ 23.) There is no indication that the messages that were left on Plaintiffs’ voicemail were prerecorded, or that when Plaintiffs answered the calls there was a delay before getting a human response. . . .The Court agrees that it is unreasonable to require a TCPA plaintiff to elaborate on the specific technical details of a defendant’s alleged ATDS, but it is not unreasonable to require a plaintiff to supplement the complaint with some additional factual detail suggesting that an ATDS was actually used. For example, a TCPA plaintiff could describe the robotic sound of the voice on the other line, the lack of human response when he attempted to have a conversation with the “person” calling him, the generic content of the message he received, or anything else about the circumstances of a call or message contributing to his belief it was prerecorded or delivered via an ATDS. Plaintiffs do not do so in the present case and may not rely on the discovery process to cure such deficiencies in the complaint. Therefore, the Court grants BSI’s Motion to Dismiss Count II of the Complaint without prejudice.