No impersonating a third-party brand on the landing page or in a linked file

JSONMarkdown

The requirementstatement

Neither the landing page a message reaches nor any file it offers for download may present itself as belonging to a business other than the registered brand.

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
campaign.sample[] -> landing page + linked download
How Ekas settles itdetectability
AI · crawlCRAWL
Needs your live site or policy page fetched and read. Ekas crawls it the way a reviewer would.
What the fix involvesfailureClass
Fix the websiteTERMINAL_WEBSITE
The fix lives on your site. No amount of rewording the form clears it.
Who requires itauthorities
CTIA
When it appliesapplicabilityText
Applies to every 10DLC registration.

Why this rule existsrationale

Impersonation moved to the landing page precisely because message text is screened and pages historically were not: the text says "your delivery", the page wears a courier's livery, and the recipient hands over card details to something they believe is the courier. CTIA extends the prohibition to linked downloads for the same reason — a PDF invoice on somebody else's letterhead does the same work as a cloned page. Legitimate senders hit this through reseller and white-label arrangements where the page genuinely carries a partner's branding and nobody thought of it as impersonation.

How to fix itremediation

Make the destination page identify the registered brand above the fold — name, logo and contact route — and remove any third-party branding you are not authorised to display. Where you act for a named principal, say so on the page in the form "X, an authorised agent of Y" rather than presenting as Y. Done when the page names the sender before it names anyone else.

Common mistakespitfalls

  • A footer disclaimer does not settle it: reviewers judge what the page presents itself as on arrival, and a logo at the top outweighs a line of small print at the bottom.

Rules you will hit next

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

MSG-008Opt-in confirmation must be 20–255 charactersBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-009HELP reply must be 20–255 charactersBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-011Opt-out confirmation must be 20–255 charactersBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-018An MMS campaign must attach at least one sample media fileBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-019Each MMS sample file must sit under its per-type size ceilingBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-031Sample messages must be in EnglishBlockingBLOCKING

All message content rules

MSG-255 is one of 122 message content rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.

Reading the rules is the easy part.

Ekas runs every rule that gates approval, 823 of these 915, against your registration before it reaches the carrier. It reads your site, your policy pages and your opt-in the way a reviewer would, and hands you the fix, not just the verdict.

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