{
  "id": "MSG-246",
  "slug": "msg-246",
  "title": "No manufactured urgency",
  "statement": "Messages must not manufacture urgency — neither a security pretext such as an account about to be suspended, nor a commercial countdown, scarcity or deadline that is not real.",
  "rationale": "Urgency is the mechanism every SMS scam runs on, because a person who believes they have ninety seconds does not check the sender. Carriers therefore screen for the pattern rather than for the underlying truth, which is why an honest retailer running a fake countdown that resets every night is filtered alongside the phishing traffic it resembles. Twilio names both halves — \"your account will be suspended\" as the security pretext, fake countdowns and false scarcity as the commercial one — and codes them to rejections that are not eligible for resubmission.",
  "layer": "MESSAGE_CONTENT",
  "layerSlug": "message-content",
  "object": "campaign.sample[]",
  "severity": "BLOCKING",
  "detectability": [
    "AI_FORM"
  ],
  "failureClass": "HARD_STOP",
  "authorities": [
    "Twilio",
    "AWS"
  ],
  "codes": [
    {
      "provider": "Twilio",
      "code": "30960",
      "remediable": false,
      "generation": "gen2"
    },
    {
      "provider": "Twilio",
      "code": "30962",
      "remediable": false,
      "generation": "gen2"
    }
  ],
  "applicabilityText": "Applies to every 10DLC registration.",
  "universal": true,
  "remediation": "Take the deadline out unless it is real and you can show when it was set. A genuine sale that ends on Sunday can say so; a countdown that restarts, a \"last chance\" sent monthly, or a stock figure nobody is counting cannot. Where the message concerns a real account event, describe what happened and let the recipient act in their own time rather than telling them what is about to be lost.",
  "pitfalls": [
    "Softening the wording while keeping the mechanism does not settle it — \"ending soon\" on a promotion that never ends is the same finding as a countdown clock."
  ],
  "notes": "Absorbs the catalog's separate artificial-urgency row (MSG-247). The two are one judgement about the same defect: MSG-246 is the security pretext, MSG-247 the commercial one, and a rule that split them would report one message twice.",
  "catalogIds": [
    "MSG-247"
  ],
  "phase": "approval",
  "automated": true,
  "url": "https://ekas.io/rules/10dlc/message-content/msg-246/",
  "markdown": "https://ekas.io/rules/10dlc/message-content/msg-246.md",
  "registry": "https://ekas.io/rules/10dlc/",
  "updated": "2026-07-25",
  "licence": "CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}