A financial accounting consultant in Texas collected around $75,000 in settlements from telemarketing companies after discovering they were violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and suing.

It took a while for Dan Graham to uncover what it would take to finally stop getting an intrusive amount of calls. In an interview Sunday with KXAN, an NBC affiliate in Austin, he said he first started listing his number on the National Do Not Call Registry and filing complaints with the Better Business Bureau and Federal Trade Commission, but the calls did not stop.

“I started pushing back. I would stay on the line until I found the company behind it, then file a BBB complaint. I probably filed over two dozen BBB complaints and got nowhere, just more frustrated,” he added.

Graham said that he would get around 10-25 spam calls a day and that he could not ignore “unknown” numbers because he travels for work a lot along with having two young kids and a wife living at home.

“I probably get, in any given day, 10 on average,” said Graham about the number of spam calls and texts he receives. “I counted one day, actually…I got 24 that day,” Graham said.

“With now two young kids and a wife living in another city, just not answering the phone when I get a strange call is, that’s not an option, particularly because now these guys started spoofing phone numbers,” he said.

This led him to the TCPA and the ability to sue companies for using auto-dialed or prerecorded calls or text messages as telemarketing.

“In an effort to address a growing number of telephone marketing calls, Congress enacted in 1991 the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA),” according to the Federal Communications Commission.

Graham was able to make his case after proving that the “spam callers and texters” were using fraud tactics.

“It’s gone from just the calls that are, ‘hey, we want to sell you a car’…we want to sell insurance, to text messages that are I would say a blatant fraud. You won an iPad, or you know, you won an iPhone or your phone’s infected and you need to download this anti-virus software, things like that,” he said.

According to Graham, sharing this information helps people understand there is a way to stop spam callers and texters.

“If people knew how to push back and started doing so, we could make this kind of endless spam unaffordable for the people who do it,” Graham said in the interview.

“The hope is that there’s enough of us who stand up, start pushing back, that it becomes more expensive for companies to negligently hire these telemarketers and participate in these telemarketing practices — more expensive to do that, then the benefit they receive from it," he said.