For nearly two years, EIA members have watched a familiar name appear atop TCPA class action complaints: Chet Michael Wilson. Last week, the fight over whether Mr. Wilson may ever serve as a class representative reached a dramatic inflection point. On August 19, 2026, following oral argument in Eugene, Judge Michael J. McShane granted Freeway Insurance’s motion to deny class certification, denied Mr. Wilson’s attempt to voluntarily dismiss his own case, and entered evidence-preservation orders reaching both the plaintiff and a non-party law firm — with a written opinion to follow. Because the court had joined fourteen of Mr. Wilson’s pending cases for purposes of the motion, the ruling resolves class certification across all of them at once.

This post chronicles how the certification battle in Wilson v. Freeway Insurance Services of America, LLC, No. 6:25-cv-01869 (D. Or.), got here — through the briefing, the plaintiff’s eleventh-hour exit attempt, a subpoena fight that spilled into a Washington, D.C. courtroom, and the court’s two most recent Minutes of Proceedings.

The Case: Three Texts and a $5 Million Demand

Wilson filed his complaint on October 12, 2025, alleging that Freeway Insurance sent three marketing text messages to his cell phone on June 5, 6, and 8, 2024 — messages like “We have a quote here that could save you up to 30%. Pls call me back right away.” Because his number had been on the National Do Not Call Registry for more than thirty days, he claimed the texts violated the TCPA’s do-not-call provisions, 47 U.S.C. § 227(c)(5) and 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(c). He sought to represent a nationwide class of everyone who received more than one Freeway marketing message on a DNC-registered number without having provided their phone number to the company, with statutory damages of $500 per violation (trebled for willfulness) and a $5,000,001 demand on the civil cover sheet.

Freeway’s records told a different origin story. According to the declaration of Edgar Barboza, an executive at Freeway’s parent company, the texts were triggered by a June 4, 2024 lead submitted through an EverQuote-operated quote site under the name “Dorianne Plageman,” seeking insurance for a 2019 Mitsubishi Outlander — with Wilson’s phone number attached. Wilson swore he had never heard of Plageman, never used the associated email, and never owned the vehicle. Freeway, for its part, retained a former FBI agent who traveled to two Northern California towns and, per counsel’s declaration, “still could not locate anyone who had heard of her.”

Who typed Wilson’s number into that form — and why — became the question around which the entire certification fight would turn.

The Preemptive Strike

Rather than wait for Wilson to move for certification, Freeway went on offense. On May 16, 2026, its counsel at Watstein Terepka LLP filed a preemptive Motion to Deny Class Certification under Vinole v. Countrywide Home Loans, arguing that no amount of discovery could make Wilson an adequate class representative or make individualized issues of consent, standing, arbitration, and residential-number status predominate over common ones.

The adequacy attack was the motion’s centerpiece, and it was unusually pointed. Freeway’s filings asserted that Wilson had filed what would grow to 85 named-plaintiff TCPA class actions in under two years — “nearly 100” counting related filings — that roughly 70% had been resolved individually before any certification motion, and that Wilson had never once sought contested certification. The motion quoted Wilson’s own December 2024 social media post that his “phone number is gonna be another line of steady income,” and deposition testimony (from a related case, Wilson v. Skopos) that he had purchased his memorable, repeating-digit phone number for $1,000 and began receiving 10 to 60 unsolicited calls and texts per day “almost instantly.” Freeway summed up its theory bluntly: plaintiffs like Wilson “repeatedly use the in terrorem effect of Rule 23 to extract ‘better than the statute’ individual settlements from TCPA-compliant businesses — pocketing millions while class members get nothing.”

The motion also placed a non-party at center stage: the Heidarpour Law Firm, a D.C. firm Freeway described as the “contingency referral source” behind Wilson’s portfolio of cases, with counsel of record — including Andrew Perrong, Wilson’s attorney here — appearing on its referrals. And it attached samples of Wilson’s public social media posts containing antisemitic, racist, and violent rhetoric, arguing that a Rule 23(a)(4) fiduciary cannot publicly disparage groups of people who would inevitably be members of any nationwide class.

Two fee agreements produced in discovery became exhibits A and B of the adequacy fight. Freeway pointed to a 2024 engagement letter granting the Heidarpour firm what it characterized as blanket settlement authority over “any and all” of Wilson’s claims, and a 2025 agreement capping Wilson’s own recovery at statutory damages while directing every dollar above that cap to counsel — an arrangement Freeway illustrated memorably: “If Wilson’s lawyers generate a $100,000 individual settlement over one text, Wilson gets $500 and counsel gets $99,500. That’s a 99.5% contingency.”

It bears emphasis that these were allegations and characterizations advanced in adversarial briefing. Freeway itself told the court it was not asking for a fraud adjudication at this stage, and no court has found that Wilson or the Heidarpour firm manufactured claims.

The Exit Attempt

The timing of what happened next drew as much attention as the substance. On May 15, 2026 — one day before Freeway’s motion hit the docket, and, per Freeway’s declarations, within hours of learning the motion would detail the Heidarpour firm’s role — Wilson moved to voluntarily dismiss his individual claims with prejudice, walking away from the case with nothing. (He withdrew that first motion the same day and renewed it on June 1; the court later confirmed the June 1 filing as the operative motion.) Freeway called the move pretextual: “A plaintiff with meritorious claims does not offer to walk away — with prejudice — the moment a defendant threatens to look behind the curtain.”

Wilson’s counsel responded that there was nothing to hide. His reply brief stressed a chronology point Freeway never directly rebutted: the disputed lead was submitted on June 4, 2024, but Wilson’s first contact with the Heidarpour firm came four months later, on October 3, 2024. “A firm cannot have coordinated the manufacture of a claim months before it had any relationship, let alone any contact, with the plaintiff whose claim it is supposed to have manufactured,” he argued — and if the lead was fabricated, “why hasn’t Defendant sued EverQuote?” Wilson also produced what he said was the operative, Freeway-specific fee agreement, which he argued contained none of the offending power-of-attorney terms, and pointed out that he had rejected an early Freeway settlement offer worth several times his maximum individual recovery.

His opposition to the certification motion pressed a procedural squeeze play: Freeway had objected to producing classwide calling and consent records as “premature,” then argued certification should be denied on the record it had withheld. “Freeway simultaneously tells the Court that the record is ‘more-than-sufficiently developed,'” the opposition noted, “and that it needs sixty more days of discovery.” Wilson also had precedent in his corner — Judge McShane himself had written in the Skopos case in March that “professional litigant” criticisms are “rarely well taken,” and another Oregon judge had rejected a similar attack in April.

Meanwhile, the fight went national. Freeway subpoenaed the Heidarpour firm for documents and a deposition; the firm retained former U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal and moved to quash in the District of Columbia, where Judge Richard Leon stayed the subpoena on June 25 pending resolution. Freeway warned in its surreply that granting dismissal would moot the subpoena entirely: “The prejudice to Freeway is not delay. It is total loss of the discovery.”

The Court Steps In

By mid-July, Judge McShane had seen enough motion practice to take extraordinary case-management measures. On July 14, he ordered that he would personally oversee all fourteen of Wilson’s pending TCPA cases in the District of Oregon, and set a joint status conference at which “the parties from all of Mr. Wilson’s cases” would appear.

The August 18 Minutes of Proceedings formalized the consolidation: the court joined the fourteen cases “for purposes of class certification” and announced that its ruling on Freeway’s motion “will be dispositive as to class certification for all joined cases.” One motion, filed by one defendant, would now decide the class question for every defendant Wilson had sued in the district.

August 19: The Ruling from the Bench

The next afternoon, in Courtroom 2 in Eugene, Judge McShane heard oral argument on both pending motions. The Minutes of Proceedings — the court’s most recent word in the case — record a sweeping result:

• Freeway’s Motion to Deny Class Certification: GRANTED, “with written opinion to follow.”
• Wilson’s Motion for Voluntary Dismissal: DENIED. The plaintiff will not be permitted to exit before the court is finished with the case.
• Preservation orders: Wilson must “retain and preserve all electronic devices and communications regarding all TCPA claims and communications with the Heidarpour Law Firm” — and the non-party Heidarpour Law Firm is under a mirror-image preservation order covering this action, all TCPA actions, and its communications with Wilson.
• The court signaled it may order Wilson and the Heidarpour firm to turn their devices over to a third party, and may order Wilson to sit for another deposition.
• The court stated it will not grant class certification in any of the joined cases and will not sign off on any proposed class settlement of class claims brought by Wilson.
• All of Wilson’s other pending cases are stayed until further notice.

The reasoning will have to await the written opinion, and nothing in the minutes constitutes a finding of fraud. But the shape of the order — denying the plaintiff’s own attempt to end the case, preserving devices and law-firm communications, and floating third-party forensic review — suggests the court intends to keep digging.

What It Means for E-Commerce Brands

For EIA members who send SMS marketing, this saga carries several practical lessons. First, consent records won the day — Freeway could reconstruct the precise lead, form, disclosure language, and verification token behind every message it sent, which is what made its individualized-issues and adequacy arguments credible. Second, the preemptive motion to deny certification is a strong litigation tactic for serial abusers: defendants need not wait passively for a certification motion when the named plaintiff’s adequacy is genuinely in doubt. Third, serial-plaintiff dynamics are drawing real judicial scrutiny: a federal judge has now consolidated fourteen cases by a single plaintiff, refused to let him dismiss his way out of scrutiny, and frozen his broader docket. The written opinion — and whatever follows the preservation orders — will tell us how much further this story runs.

The EIA will report on Judge McShane’s written opinion when it issues.

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Sources: Docket and filings in Wilson v. Freeway Insurance Services of America, LLC, No. 6:25-cv-01869 (D. Or.), including the Complaint (ECF 1); Motion to Deny Class Certification and supporting declarations (ECF 19); Motion for Voluntary Dismissal (ECF 20); Opposition and Wilson Declaration (ECF 28–29); Reply and Watstein Declaration (ECF 32–33); Surreply briefing (ECF 34); Scheduling Orders (ECF 25, 30); and Minutes of Proceedings of August 18 and August 19, 2026 (ECF 45, 47). All characterizations of parties’ allegations are drawn from their respective filings; no court has issued findings on the fraud-related allegations described above.

Ecommerce Innovation Alliance provides members with analysis of litigation and regulatory developments affecting online commerce and digital marketing. This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.