A referral programme must not pay people to forward messages

The requirementstatement

Consumers who send viral or referral messages must receive nothing of value for doing so.

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.description + campaign.message_flow + campaign.sample[]
Where it liveslayer: OperationalOPERATIONAL
How Ekas settles itdetectability: AI · formAI_FORM; 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.
What the fix involvesfailureClass: Fix the fieldRETRY_FIELD; A better value in the form fixes it. Ekas can rewrite it and re-check.
Who requires itauthorities: CTIA
When it appliesapplicabilityText: Applies to every 10DLC registration.

Why this rule existsrationale

Paying for forwards turns the sender's friends into a purchased audience: the recipient gets a message from someone they trust, sent for a reward rather than because it was relevant, and there is no consent anywhere in the chain. It is the one part of referral marketing the industry prohibits outright, and it is easy to walk into — a discount for a successful invite is exactly the mechanic every growth playbook recommends.

How to fix itremediation

Remove the incentive from the forwarding step. Reward the new subscriber's own opt-in if you want a referral mechanic at all, and have the invitee opt in on your own surface rather than receiving a message the referrer triggered. Done when nothing of value depends on a consumer sending a message to somebody else.

A compliant exampleexample

Share Acme Coffee with a friend — when they sign up at acmecoffee.com/join they get 20% off their first order. (The reward goes to the new customer, not to the referrer.)

Common mistakespitfalls

Sweepstake entries, loyalty points and account credit all count as something of value; the prohibition is not limited to cash.

Notesnotes

Applies only to viral and referral programmes, which the registration has no attribute for. The judge is told to PASS immediately where the campaign describes no forwarding mechanic, and this note records the carve-out the applicability model cannot express.

Rules you will hit next

2 other rules read campaign.description + campaign.message_flow + campaign.sample[]. Fixing one field to satisfy a single rule is how a resubmission trades one rejection for another, so read these before you change anything.

CMP-038Campaign fields must reference one company, not severalBlockingBLOCKING MSG-FIELD-SIMILARITYDescription, message flow, and samples must not be the same textHighHIGH 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

All operational rules

OPS-385 is one of 139 operational rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.