TCPA Compliance Guide: Protect Your Business from $1,500 Per-Call Fines

The TCPA allows statutory damages of up to $1,500 per call or text — and there is no cap on total liability. Here is what every US business running outbound calls or texts should know, and the screening steps to take before the first dial. This is general information, not legal advice.

What Is the TCPA?

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), enacted in 1991 and significantly expanded by FCC rule-making through the 2010s, restricts how businesses may contact consumers by phone. The core prohibitions relevant to most businesses are:

• No autodialed or prerecorded calls or texts to mobile numbers without prior express consent — and prior express written consent for marketing
• No telemarketing calls or texts to numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry without an exemption, such as an established business relationship or prior express written consent
• No artificial or prerecorded telemarketing messages to residential landlines without prior express written consent
• Opt-out requests must be honored — by any reasonable means the consumer uses
• Time restrictions: telemarketing calls only between 8am–9pm local time of the called party (some states are stricter)

TCPA Penalties: The Numbers

Example: a single SMS campaign of 10,000 messages that reaches 500 numbers on the DNC Registry without consent could mean $250,000 in statutory damages at $500 each — before any willful multiplier. Courts have certified TCPA class actions with aggregate damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Professional Plaintiff Problem

The TCPA gives individuals a private right of action — anyone who receives an unlawful call or text can sue without proving actual damages. This has created a group of frequent TCPA plaintiffs who file many lawsuits a year.

Our DNC checker screens every number against the TCPA Litigator list as well as the Federal (National) DNC list and 6 state lists. Filtering out TCPA Litigators before your campaign is one of the most cost-effective risk-reduction steps you can take.

Building a TCPA-Aware Outbound Process

1. Obtain documented consent — Get prior express written consent before sending marketing texts or autodialed calls to mobile numbers. Store consent records with timestamps.
2. Scrub against DNC before every campaign — Run your list through a DNC checker before each campaign; registry data used for telemarketing must be no more than 31 days old.
3. Identify line types — Only text mobile numbers. Use a mobile validator to classify your list.
4. Remove TCPA Litigators — Drop any number marked TCPA Litigator.
5. Honor opt-outs quickly — Keep a suppression list; FCC rules require honoring opt-out requests within 10 business days at most.
6. Maintain scrub records — Document every DNC scrub with date, results, and list version.

Automate Compliance with the Phone Validator API

Manual list scrubbing before each campaign is error-prone. With the Phone Validator API you can automate checks at every point of contact capture — web forms, CRM imports, dialer intake. The Phone + DNC Lookup API returns the Valid/Invalid status, line type and carrier together with the DNC result (Federal and state lists, TCPA Litigator list) for each number in one call. Using RealValidito does not register you with the National DNC Registry and does not by itself make your outreach compliant.