The national do-not-call registry must be scrubbed before any solicitation

The requirementstatement

Recipient lists must be scrubbed against the national do-not-call registry before any telephone solicitation, unless prior express written consent or an established business relationship applies.

Severityseverity: BlockingBLOCKINGBreaking this rule gets the submission rejected. There is no partial credit.
When it bitesphase: After you are livepostFalls due once you are sending: STOP handling, quiet hours, suppression, record retention.
What is checkedobject: recipient list against the national registry
Where it liveslayer: OperationalOPERATIONAL
How Ekas settles itdetectability: External recordEXTERNAL_DATA; The fact that settles it lives in a register we cannot query, such as the IRS file, a postal database, or another provider’s tenant. Reported as a warning with the evidence to check, not as a pass.
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: FCCFTC
When it appliesapplicabilityText: Applies to every 10DLC registration.

Why this rule existsrationale

Registry violations carry per-message statutory damages and are the single most litigated part of the framework, and the exemptions are narrower than operators assume — an established business relationship expires, and "we have their number" is not express written consent. The scrub is what converts an argument about the exemption into a list that never contained the number.

How to fix itremediation

Subscribe to the registry for the area codes you message, scrub before every solicitation send, and keep the scrub record with its registry version date. Done when a solicitation list has been through a scrub you can evidence, not merely through a consent check.

Common mistakespitfalls

Relying on consent to skip the scrub is defensible only where the consent is genuinely express and written; scrubbing anyway costs little and removes the argument.

Check this yourselfattestation

No tool can settle this one for you. Here is the check, and what wrong looks like.

Which of your sends are solicitations — and has each of those lists been through a national registry scrub you can evidence?

1Classify your sends. The classification is yours, and getting it wrong in the permissive direction is where the exposure sits.
2Subscribe to the registry for the area codes you message, and scrub before every solicitation send.
3Keep the scrub record with its registry version date.

What wrong looks like: The exemptions are narrower than operators assume — an established business relationship expires, and "we have their number" is not express written consent. Relying on consent to skip the scrub leaves an argument where a clean list would have left none.

Notesnotes

A federal subscription we cannot hold for the brand. What the user has to do is register for access, pay the per-area-code fee, and decide which of their sends are solicitations — the classification is theirs, and getting it wrong in the permissive direction is where the exposure sits. OPS-109 covers documenting the process.

Rules you will hit next

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

OPS-026The universal opt-out keyword set must be declaredBlockingBLOCKING OPS-027Opt-out keyword handling must be declared, not assumedBlockingBLOCKING OPS-029A revocation must survive punctuation, case and surrounding wordsBlockingBLOCKING OPS-031A plainly-worded opt-out counts even with no keyword in itBlockingBLOCKING OPS-033STOP must never come back as an errorBlockingBLOCKING OPS-037On a shared address, STOP must stop everythingBlockingBLOCKING

All operational rules

OPS-102 is one of 139 operational rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.