A demand letter is a settlement invitation with a deadline attached. It is usually not the beginning of litigation and it is almost never a bluff worth calling on your own. What you do in the first day determines whether it stays a nuisance.
Do these first
- Suppress the number everywhere — dialler, SMS platform, email tool, CRM sequences. Everywhere, not the system you happen to be in.
- Preserve. Freeze deletion policies on call recordings, logs, CRM history and the consent record. Routine deletion after notice is its own problem.
- Pull the consent record: timestamp, IP, page URL and the disclosure as it was rendered that day.
- Pull every call and message to that number with dates, times and durations.
- Find where the lead came from and notify the vendor in writing.
- Involve counsel before responding. Do not negotiate on the phone.
What the letter is testing
Whether you can produce a consent record. A broker who replies within days with the disclosure text, the timestamp, the IP and the page is a much less attractive defendant than one who takes three weeks and produces a CRM flag. The evidence is the negotiating position — there is no separate one.
This is the practical argument for buying leads from a vendor who can produce that record on demand rather than one who describes their process. You are the one holding the letter, and "the vendor said they had consent" is not evidence of consent.
Afterwards
| Check | Question to answer |
|---|---|
| Source | Did this lead come from a channel we should stop buying? |
| Suppression | Why did it not propagate on its own? |
| Cadence | How many attempts had we made, over how long? |
| Scrub | Was this number scrubbed, and when? |
| Records | Could we produce the consent record quickly, or not? |
A demand letter is expensive information about your own process. The shops that get a second one are the shops that settled the first and changed nothing.
Questions brokers ask
What should I do first after a TCPA demand letter?
Suppress the number across every outbound channel and preserve all records — call logs, recordings, CRM history and the consent record. Then pull the evidence together and get counsel involved before replying.
Should I call the person who sent the demand?
No. Continued contact after notice is the fact that supports a willfulness finding, which trebles damages from $500 to $1,500 per call. Communication goes through counsel, in writing.
Is a TCPA demand letter usually a lawsuit?
Usually it is a settlement demand with a deadline rather than a filed case. That does not make it safe to ignore — ignoring one is how it becomes a filed case, and the damages are calculated per call.
Can I pass the claim to my lead vendor?
Notify them in writing immediately and check what your agreement says about indemnity, but plan on the basis that you placed the call and the exposure is yours. A vendor who can produce a clean consent record helps enormously; one who cannot has just told you something about the rest of your list.
What evidence matters most?
The consent record — the timestamp, the IP, the page URL and the disclosure text as the merchant saw it — together with a complete log of every contact attempt. Producing that quickly is the difference between a nuisance and a problem.
Alex Makowski
Founder, Infinite Bookings
Runs the lead generation operation behind Infinite Bookings — paid traffic, the funding application, and the delivery pipeline that puts records into brokers’ CRMs.
Reachable directly at alex@infinitebookings.com or 732-609-7182.