Six mistakes businesses make in the first week after a TCPA demand letter

The six mistakes businesses make in the first week after a TCPA demand letter are: calling the sender and arguing, leaving the dialer running on the listed numbers, tidying up the records, deciding the letter is a scam because the sender is not a law firm, paying before verifying and without a release, and stopping the inquiry at "the vendor made the calls". Two of them, the dialer and the records, can turn a small matter into a large one. The others waste the window in which the matter is cheapest to resolve or to dispute.

1. Calling the sender and arguing

The letter arrives, the owner picks up the phone, and for twenty minutes explains that the business does not do that, the list was clean, the vendor handles all of it, and the calls were only a few. Every one of those sentences is a statement about the facts, made before the logs were checked, with no record of it except the sender's. Some of them will turn out to be wrong, and the owner has now said them. Write instead. A written exchange is a record you control, and it slows you down enough to check before you assert. The four things to do first are on before you call anyone about the letter.

2. Leaving the dialer on

The listed numbers are still in the campaign. Nobody pulled them because nobody decided what to do about the letter yet. Each call or text to those numbers after the letter arrived is a call made with knowledge that the number should not be called, which is the test for trebling to $1,500 per violation under § 227(b)(3) and § 227(c)(5). A business that takes two weeks to decide, with the dialer running, can double the exposure it is deciding about. Suppress the numbers in every system, including every vendor's, on the day the letter arrives, and keep the confirmations.

3. Tidying the records

An understandable instinct: the CRM is a mess, the old lead files are embarrassing, the recordings take up space. The letter's preservation paragraph exists because litigation is reasonably anticipated from the moment it arrives, and records destroyed after that point can carry serious consequences in a later case, up to a court instructing a jury to assume the records would have hurt you. Keep everything exactly as it is, including scheduled purges you would otherwise let run. Records that help your position are protected by the same instruction.

4. Deciding it is a scam because the sender is not a law firm

The sender is a company, not a firm; the letter has no bar number; a forum thread says these people never sue. So the letter goes in a drawer. The TCPA gives the person called a private right of action, a company can pursue the claim for them before it is referred to counsel, and the suit, when it comes, is filed in the person's name by a firm you have not heard of yet. The test for a scam is the absence of specific calls and a demand for untraceable payment, not the absence of a lawyer. The checks are on is it real.

5. Paying before verifying, or without a release

The opposite error. The figure is manageable, the deadline is close, and paying feels like making it stop. Two problems. If the sender has not been verified, the payment may go to a fraud while the real claim, if any, is untouched. And a payment without a written release that names every call and text in the letter buys nothing in particular; the listed calls can be raised again, and so can calls not listed. Verify the sender, match the calls, and get the release in writing before any money moves. Pay by a method that leaves a record.

6. Stopping at "the vendor did it"

The calls were placed by a lead generator or a call centre, so the owner writes back saying so and considers the matter closed. It is not. The FCC's 2013 ruling in the Dish Network matter, applied by the courts since, holds that a seller can be liable for calls made on its behalf under ordinary agency principles, whether by authority, apparent authority or ratification. The vendor's conduct is a question of recovery between you and the vendor under your contract, not a defence against the person who was called. The right move is a written demand to the vendor for the consent records, lead sources and dialer logs for every listed number, and notice under the indemnity clause, in the same week.

The pattern under all six

Each mistake substitutes a feeling for a record. Anger for logs, inertia for suppression, embarrassment for preservation, suspicion for verification, relief for a release, blame for a contract. The week goes better in the order on the 72-hour timeline: find three things, verify, suppress, preserve, pull the logs, then decide.