TCPA
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act — a 1991 federal law restricting autodialed and prerecorded calls, unsolicited telemarketing, and unwanted text messages, regardless of business size.
The statute gives a person who receives a violating call or text the right to sue directly, for $500 per violation, raised to as much as $1,500 for a willful violation, with no cap on the total — and because damages attach per message, not per campaign, a single automated send to a real-sized list becomes that many separate violations at once. The FCC has long treated a text as a “call” for TCPA purposes.
A restaurant's ordering system builds a list of 400 numbers, each collected solely to send that customer's own order confirmation — purely transactional. Six months later, someone texts that same list a one-time promotional discount. If it goes out as a bulk send without marketing-specific consent, it's 400 separate violations at once, clearing $200,000 at the base statutory rate alone.
The most common mistake is assuming the TCPA only covers classic, live-salesperson telemarketing. It covers automated and prerecorded calls generally, and texts, just as often — and there's no small-business carve-out anywhere in the statute.
Dohos's voice product only ever answers a call a customer places — it never originates an outbound call to a list or runs a win-back campaign, and any SMS sent after a call stays transactional, covered on TCPA.
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