What lawyers hoped would be a run-of-the-mill telemarketing lawsuit has turned chaotic after the defendant said it found antisemitic and racist social media videos and posts by the plaintiff, an Oregon man who has filed around 100 similar cases.
Attorneys representing Chet Wilson recently pushed the eject button on their case against Freeway Insurance Services of America, one of countless companies in the country to have been hit with a proposed class action lawsuit under the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
And Freeway, which could walk away and pay Wilson and Perrong Law nothing, wants the case to remain open to investigate whether another firm – Heidarpour Law Firm – is using fraudulent means to generate TCPA class actions. The two issues were raised in recent filings by Freeway and leave Judge Michael McShane with a mess to sort out.
Freeway told Perrong it would be bringing Wilson’s character into the case in a motion to deny certification, and Perrong filed a notice of voluntary dismissal shortly after.
“Plaintiff’s response to that motion was not to defend his adequacy or rebut the evidence,” attorneys for the company wrote June 15.
“It was to run, but only after forcing Freeway to incur the enormous expense of investigating and bringing a motion that most other victims of this scheme do not have the resources to pursue – particularly when taking an extortionate individual settlement is cheaper.”
A month earlier, Freeway’s attorney Ryan Watstein filed a declaration detailing what he had found on Wilson’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. That included a video from 10 days earlier in which Wilson called Jewish people “parasites” for whom he has “holes f---ing dug already,” Watstein says. The video has been removed.
Details of other posts can be read here. They include homophobic and racist slurs and led Freeway to declare him unfit to represent a class that would include LGBTQ+, Black and Jewish people.
While this is certainly a unique situation in TCPA cases, Freeway worries that the manner in which the case was brought is emblematic of a level of fraud by TCPA lawyers and plaintiffs. Previous Legal Newsline coverage has detailed the efforts plaintiffs take to receive a telemarketing call in order to sue over it, like a Pennsylvania woman who admitted she had a shoebox of phones with Florida numbers she’d figured once belonged to people who owed money to creditors.
In Freeway’s case, its website includes an online form users fill out when requesting insurance quotes, and the company says it doesn’t cold-call anyone. Wilson’s phone number was on one such request, so Freeway called it back. But the name on the lead form wasn’t Wilson’s – it was Dorianne Plageman.
Freeway deployed a retired FBI investigator to find Plageman but he was unsuccessful when he visited “multiple people associated with nearby addresses – including the manager of a mobile home park where Ms. Plageman reportedly lived – and still could not locate anyone who had heard of her,” Watstein wrote.
This led to a subpoena and a deposition request that the Heidarpour firm is now fighting. The firm calls the information requested “irrelevant, privileged and not crucial to the preparation of the underlying case,” but Freeway is wondering if Heidarpour clients are filling out online forms with their numbers under other names.
The last time Watstein filed a similar subpoena, the case was voluntarily dismissed like Wilson is attempting to do.
“That’s what has kept the wheels of this scheme turning across nearly 100 cases filed by Chet Wilson and hundreds more filed in the name of other serial TCPA litigants originated by the Heidarpour Law Firm and prosecuted by a small group of co-counsel,” Freeway says.
Heidarpour “plays a recurring behind-the-scenes role” in originating lawsuits, Watstein says, and when it doesn’t represent a client in court it passes them off to another firm and retains a financial interest in the case.
TCPA cases are filed as class actions but rarely ever become one. Quick settlements that Watstein estimates average about $50,000 but can reach six figures are often cheaper and less risky than fighting a claim in court.
Wilson is far from the only serial plaintiff in the world of TCPA litigation. Recent research suggests 397 plaintiffs accounted for more than half of the cases filed in 2025. Wilson filed 52 last year and has some significant legal victories under his belt.
His lawyer Perrong says Freeway’s attack is “long on rhetoric and short on facts or law.” The fraud claims “rest on speculation about other clients and other cases, not on anything in the record of this case.”
Perrong attached screenshots of the initial contact with Wilson, made, it says, before there was ever contact between Wilson and Heidarpour.
“That a case was filed as a putative class action and later resolved individually is not, without more, indicative of anything improper,” Perrong wrote. “There are numerous legitimate reasons a plaintiff, his counsel, and a defendant might agree to take that course.”
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