# BRD-286 — Fabricated business details are a permanent disqualification

> The brand record must describe a real business; fabricated details or a known scam pattern must never be submitted.

- **Rule ID:** BRD-286
- **Layer:** Brand (`BRAND`)
- **Checks:** `the whole brand record`
- **Severity:** BLOCKING — Breaking this rule gets the submission rejected outright.
- **When it bites:** Gates approval — get this wrong and registration is refused
- **How it is detected:** AI judgement over the submitted form; External record we cannot query — reported as a warning to verify
- **Fix type:** Hard stop — not remediable, resubmission will not help
- **Required by:** Twilio
- **Applies:** Applies to every 10DLC registration.
- **Canonical URL:** https://ekas.io/rules/10dlc/brand/brd-286/

## Why this rule exists

This is the one brand finding with no remediation: a registration judged fabricated is not corrected, it is refused, and the account behind it is reviewed. The reason is that a fake brand is the entire mechanism of an SMS scam — the identity is what a consumer would use to check who texted them, so inventing it defeats the framework rather than bending it. It matters here because well-meaning placeholder data on a demo brand is indistinguishable from the real thing.

## How to fix it

Do not submit this registration. Every field must describe a business that exists, at an address it occupies, with a website it controls. If you are testing, use a mock brand (BRD-204), which burns no fee and pollutes no duplicate-detection index.

## Provider rejection codes

| Provider | Code | Resubmission allowed |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Twilio | `30959` | no |
| Twilio | `30885` | no |

## Check this yourself

**Does every field on this brand describe a business that actually exists, at an address it actually occupies, with a website it actually controls?**

1. Go through the record field by field and name the source of each value: the IRS letter, the lease, the DNS registrar.
2. Any value that came from a template, a placeholder, or 'we will fix it later' must be replaced before submission, not after.
3. Testing rather than registering? Use a mock brand — it burns no fee and pollutes no duplicate index.

*What wrong looks like:* A demo brand with plausible filler details submitted for real. It is indistinguishable from a fraudulent registration, and the outcome is refusal without resubmission plus a review of the account behind it.

## Notes

Absorbs WEB-144, which is the same prohibition detected from the other side — site details that do not match public records. Twilio treats it as ineligible for resubmission, which is why this is HARD_STOP rather than a retry. The user cannot fix a fabricated record by editing it; what they have to do is register the real business, and if they believe the finding is wrong, appeal with documentation rather than resubmitting.