A toll-free number must belong to one business

The requirementstatement

A single toll-free number must be associated with exactly one business.

Severityseverity: BlockingBLOCKINGBreaking this rule gets the submission rejected. There is no partial credit.
When it bitesphase: Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
What is checkedobject: toll-free number to brand mapping
Where it liveslayer: Consent flowCONSENT_FLOW
How Ekas settles itdetectability: AI · formAI_FORMHuman checkHUMAN; A semantic question about what you wrote: whether a description matches a use case, whether a name looks like a filed entity. Judged by a model against written criteria. Only someone holding the document or making the call can settle it. Ekas tells you exactly what to look at.
What the fix involvesfailureClass: Wait on someone elseTERMINAL_EXTERNAL; Needs an external system or a waiting period, such as IRS propagation, a vetting result, or a carrier queue.
Who requires itauthorities: AWS
When it appliesapplicabilityText: Applies to every 10DLC registration.

Why this rule existsrationale

A number shared across businesses makes every consent on it ambiguous — the consumer agreed to hear from one of them and cannot tell which is texting, and neither can a reviewer tracing a complaint. It is a common shape in franchise groups and agencies, where one number is provisioned centrally and used by several trading entities because that is how the phone system was set up years earlier.

How to fix itremediation

Provision a separate toll-free number per business and register each against its own brand. Where a number is already shared, move the other businesses off it before submitting — a verification approved against one brand does not extend to the others using the number.

Check this yourselfattestation

Ekas flags this from what you submit, but the fact that settles it sits somewhere only you can reach.

Is exactly one business sending from the toll-free number on this registration?

1Ask your carrier or messaging platform for the list of accounts and sub-accounts provisioned against this number.
2Read the list as a consumer would: every distinct trading entity on it is a separate business claiming the same number.
3Common in franchise groups and agencies, where one number was provisioned centrally years earlier.

What wrong looks like: Three franchisees share the number their head office bought. A verification approved for one of them does not extend to the other two, and a complaint against any of them lands on all three.

Notesnotes

NOT VISIBLE TO US. The registry holds no number inventory, so we cannot see which numbers a brand has or who else is sending from them. Surfaced as a warning with the check the user must run themselves: list every business currently sending from the toll-free number on this registration, and confirm the answer is one. Their carrier or messaging platform can produce that list; we cannot.

Rules you will hit next

Other consent flow rules at the same severity. A registration is judged as a whole, not rule by rule.

CON-008The live CTA and the declared message flow must say the same thingBlockingBLOCKING CON-010The three subscriber-management attributes must be declared trueBlockingBLOCKING CON-013Subscriber attributes must agree with the message bodies suppliedBlockingBLOCKING CON-023Evidence URLs must resolve without a loginBlockingBLOCKING CON-024The opt-in URL must serve a certificate that verifiesBlockingBLOCKING CON-027The opt-in URL must land on a page that carries the opt-inBlockingBLOCKING

All consent flow rules

CON-150 is one of 101 consent flow rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.