# OPS-089 — A ported number is a new subscriber

> A fresh opt-in must be obtained when a subscriber ports their number between carriers.

- **Rule ID:** OPS-089
- **Layer:** Operational (`OPERATIONAL`)
- **Checks:** `subscriber port event against consent status`
- **Severity:** MEDIUM — Usually survives review, but lowers your trust score or invites manual review.
- **When it bites:** Falls due after approval, once you are live and sending
- **How it is detected:** Not knowable before submission — reported with its deadline
- **Fix type:** Wait on an external system or a required interval
- **Required by:** CTIA, MMA
- **Applies:** Applies to every 10DLC registration.
- **Canonical URL:** https://ekas.io/rules/10dlc/operational/ops-089/

## Why this rule exists

Porting is one of the routes by which the person behind a number changes without any signal in the brand's own data, and short-code programmes in particular are expected to re-permission across it. Nothing in the sending platform surfaces a port, so a list treats the number as continuously consenting while the handset it reaches may have changed hands entirely.

## How to fix it

Where your platform exposes port or carrier-change events, treat one as expiring the consent and re-confirm before the next send. Where it does not, lean on the deactivation feeds and the reassigned-numbers query, which catch most of the same population. Done when a carrier change does not silently preserve consent.

## Check this yourself

**Does your provider surface porting or carrier-change events at all?**

1. Ask. Most do not.
2. Where it does, treat a port as expiring the consent and re-confirm before the next send.
3. Where it does not, lean on the deactivation feeds and the reassigned-numbers query, which catch most of the same population.

*What wrong looks like:* Nothing in the sending platform surfaces a port, so the list treats the number as continuously consenting while the handset it reaches may have changed hands entirely.

## Notes

A carrier event we never see. What the user has to check is whether their provider surfaces porting at all — most do not, and where that is true this obligation is discharged in practice by OPS-083 and OPS-087 rather than directly.