The short answer
Preserve everything immediately, suppress the number across every channel, pull the consent record and the call logs, and get counsel involved before you reply. The single worst move is to keep calling — continued contact after notice converts an argument about one call into an argument about willfulness, which is what trebles the damages from $500 to $1,500 per call.
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.