The Telephone Consumer Protection Act is a long statute with a longer set of implementing rules, but the violations that end up in demand letters cluster around a handful of practices. These are the five we document most, with the provision each one breaches and what a business can do about it.
1. Calling numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry
The FCC’s rule at 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(c)(2) prohibits a telephone solicitation to a number that has been on the registry for 31 days or more. Two or more such calls or texts within twelve months give the recipient a claim under 47 U.S.C. § 227(c)(5). Businesses usually breach this by buying lead lists that were never scrubbed, or by scrubbing once and dialing for months afterwards. The registry must be checked every 31 days.
2. Dialing outside permitted hours
Federal rules permit solicitations between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the recipient’s time zone, and Florida stops at 8 p.m. A dialer configured to the caller’s clock breaches this every evening on the other side of the country. Each call outside the window is a separate violation, and a pattern of them is evidence that the conduct was knowing.
3. Prerecorded or artificial voices without written consent
A marketing call that uses a prerecorded or artificial voice, including a voicemail drop or an AI voice, requires the recipient’s prior express written consent under 47 U.S.C. § 227(b) and 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(a)(2). The 2021 Supreme Court decision in Facebook v. Duguid narrowed what counts as an autodialer, but it did nothing to the prerecorded-voice rule. Ringless voicemail is treated as a call.
4. Continuing after a request to stop
A STOP reply, a spoken request not to be called, or a letter all have the same effect. Every call or text after the request is made without consent, and the business must record the request on its internal do-not-call list within a reasonable time. Where messaging runs through several platforms or vendors, a STOP received on one is often never passed to the others. Each subsequent message is a violation.
5. Not saying who is calling, and for whom
Under 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(d)(4), every telemarketing call must give the name of the individual caller, the name of the business on whose behalf the call is made, and a telephone number or address at which that business can be contacted. Calls that open with a first name and a script, and never name the company, breach this on every call. They also tend to be the calls that are hardest for the business to trace back to its own vendor.
The common thread
Four of the five are process failures, not decisions. A business that scrubs its lists every 31 days, enforces hours by the recipient’s time zone, uses a written-consent form for any automated or recorded call, routes every STOP to a single internal list, and scripts a full identification on every call will not receive a letter from us. The rules are set out under What counts as a violation, with full citations under Authorities.