# CON-075 — A promotion must be open to people who do not join the SMS programme

> Participation in a promotion, loyalty scheme or offer must not require the consumer to be enrolled in text messaging.

- **Rule ID:** CON-075
- **Layer:** Consent flow (`CONSENT_FLOW`)
- **Checks:** `promotion terms; CTA copy`
- **Severity:** HIGH — Rejected by at least one carrier or provider, and a common cause of failure at the rest.
- **When it bites:** Gates approval — get this wrong and registration is refused
- **How it is detected:** AI judgement over the submitted form
- **Fix type:** Fix the website — no form edit clears it
- **Required by:** T-Mobile, AT&T, FCC
- **Applies:** Applies to every 10DLC registration.
- **Canonical URL:** https://ekas.io/rules/10dlc/consent-flow/con-075/

## Why this rule exists

T-Mobile puts it flatly: participation in text promotions should never be a requirement. When the only way to get the member price is to be on the list, the enrolment is the price of the discount rather than a decision about messaging, and the carrier reads the resulting numbers as coerced. Brands arrive here by building the offer around the channel — the promotion genuinely runs over SMS — without noticing they have made the channel compulsory.

## How to fix it

Give the promotion a second route in — a web account, an email sign-up, a code at the till — and price it the same. Keep the SMS enrolment as one way to participate rather than the gate. Done when the terms describe SMS as optional and a non-subscriber can claim the same offer.

## Example of a compliant value

```text
Join Acme Coffee Rewards online, in store, or by text. Members get 10% off however they joined; text alerts are optional and you can reply STOP at any time.
```

## Common mistakes

- An SMS-only tier that is materially better than every other tier is a requirement in practice, whatever the terms say.

## Provider rejection codes

| Provider | Code | Resubmission allowed |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Twilio | `30475` | yes |

## Notes

Distinct from CON-076: there the prize is what buys the opt-in, here the opt-in is what buys the promotion. They fail in opposite directions and are fixed differently — 076 by decoupling the entry, this one by opening a second route in.