Two powerful TCPA decisions in three days is not a coincidence you get to write about very often. Just 48 hours after a federal magistrate judge in California denied Jamee Desouza’s attempt to scrub her employer’s name from the record in Desouza v. Ralph Lauren, a federal judge in Michigan issued an opinion that is, if anything, even more consequential for ecommerce brands tired of playing defense against professional plaintiffs. Specialty Medical Inc. v. Mark Dobronski et al., Case No. 2:25-cv-10664 (E.D. Mich.), doesn’t just expose the mechanics of how a serial TCPA plaintiff allegedly operates. It opens a legal counteroffensive that most companies have never seriously considered — and on February 26, 2026, Judge Mark A. Goldsmith made clear that courts should be willing to let that counteroffensive proceed.
Read that again: the plaintiff in this story isn’t the consumer. The plaintiff is the company. And the RICO defendant is the person who called in.
The Setup: A Call That Was Never What It Seemed
Specialty Medical Inc. is a durable medical equipment supplier. Its business depends on calls and relationship-building with prospective customers. On February 3, 2025, someone called in and gave Specialty Medical’s representatives a false name, false information about his health conditions, false details about his existing equipment use, and fabricated insurance information — all the markers of a legitimate DME prospect. He gave a Michigan-based callback number as his contact. Specialty Medical followed up.
He called again the next day. Then, using a different Florida number registered to his company — an LLC called Safe Train — he called once more. This time, he dropped the pretense. He revealed he had been using an alias. And then he delivered the punchline: that callback number he’d given them? It was on the National Do Not Call Registry.
His name was Mark Dobronski.
The Playbook: False Identities, Manufactured Claims, and a Multi-Year Pattern
Dobronski, the court’s opinion makes clear, was not a confused consumer who stumbled into a run-in with an overzealous DME marketer. He was a seasoned TCPA litigant with a documented history of using false names to engineer the very phone calls he then turned into lawsuits. Court records from prior cases — including matters filed as far back as 2021 — showed that Dobronski had admitted under oath to using aliases in the course of generating TCPA claims. The cases spanned years. They followed the same pattern. And they generated settlements.
Specialty Medical had apparently had enough. Rather than cut a check and move on, the company sued Dobronski and Safe Train LLC under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — RICO. The theory: that Dobronski, his wife, and his company constituted a criminal enterprise whose purpose was to commit wire fraud by making false representations over phone lines in order to manufacture TCPA claims and extract settlement payments.
The Motion to Dismiss: Four Arguments, Zero Success
Dobronski moved to dismiss on four grounds. The court rejected all of them.
A RICO enterprise exists. The court found that Dobronski, Safe Train LLC, and his wife plausibly constituted an ongoing enterprise with a shared purpose — profiting from fraudulently manufactured TCPA litigation — relationships among the members, and sufficient longevity to establish the kind of continuity RICO requires. This wasn’t a one-off dispute; it was, the court found, a scheme at least five years in the making.
Wire fraud is a viable predicate act. RICO requires a predicate act of racketeering, and Specialty Medical alleged wire fraud: that each time Dobronski called in with a false identity and fabricated health and insurance details, he was transmitting fraudulent representations over the wires in interstate commerce to extract something of value. The court found that allegation specific enough to survive under the heightened pleading standard that applies to fraud claims — identifying who made the calls, what false statements were made, when the calls occurred, and how the scheme was designed to work.
There is a sufficient pattern of racketeering. A single incident is not a RICO pattern. But Dobronski’s documented use of false names across multiple cases, spanning years, in a consistent scheme to generate TCPA settlements? The court found that adequately pleaded.
Noerr-Pennington does not protect manufactured litigation. This is perhaps the most significant holding in the opinion. The Noerr-Pennington doctrine generally shields the act of petitioning the courts from liability — the theory being that access to the legal system is itself a protected right. Dobronski argued that his filing of TCPA suits was protected petitioning activity that RICO couldn’t touch. The court said no. When the underlying conduct consists of deliberately fabricating the facts that give rise to the legal claim — using false names, inventing health conditions, manufacturing the predicate phone call — that isn’t protected access to courts. It’s fraud. And fraud falls outside Noerr-Pennington’s shelter.
Why This Case Matters for Ecommerce Brands
The EIA has tracked the professionalization of TCPA litigation for years. The statute was designed to protect real consumers from genuinely unwanted calls and texts, and that purpose is legitimate. But an entire cottage industry has grown up around manufacturing TCPA exposure — filing high volumes of cases, many of them against companies with robust consent practices, and extracting settlements from businesses that find it cheaper to pay than to fight. Some of those plaintiffs use legal phone numbers that were always intended for litigation, not communication. Some use multiple identities. And as Specialty Medical now shows, some allegedly call in under false pretenses and wait for the callbacks.
Demand letters deserve as much scrutiny as complaints. Before Specialty Medical was ever served with a lawsuit, it had already been handed the evidence it needed to mount a RICO offense. The pattern of prior litigation, the shifting phone numbers, the fabricated information — all of it was knowable. When you receive a TCPA demand, particularly one seeking implausibly large sums, investigate the person behind it before deciding whether to settle.
Prior litigation history is a critical data point. Dobronski’s use of false identities in prior cases was part of the court record in those prior cases. That history, properly documented and connected, is what made the RICO pattern allegation viable here. If your company has been hit by the same plaintiff twice, or if a plaintiff’s name appears in TCPA cases across multiple industries, that pattern is not just interesting background — it may be the foundation of a racketeering claim.
The Noerr-Pennington argument is not a magic shield. Defense counsel defending ecommerce brands against serial TCPA plaintiffs should understand that Noerr-Pennington does not immunize litigation that was itself generated through fraud. If the underlying phone call was manufactured — if the “consumer” gave a false name or fabricated circumstances to trigger the contact — that predicate fraud potentially defeats the petitioning defense entirely.
The Bottom Line
Specialty Medical v. Dobronski is still in its early stages. Surviving a motion to dismiss is not the same as winning at trial, and Dobronski will have his opportunity to contest the allegations. But the motion to dismiss ruling is itself significant: it establishes that a company victimized by a serial TCPA plaintiff who allegedly used false identities to manufacture claims has a viable path to hold that plaintiff accountable under federal racketeering law, that Noerr-Pennington will not protect fraudulent litigation conduct, and that courts in the Sixth Circuit are willing to treat this kind of scheme as the organized enterprise it appears to be.
For the ecommerce brands that have absorbed years of TCPA settlements from plaintiffs who never intended to be customers — this case is worth watching closely.
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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.
