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Outbound calling in the United States runs under a handful of federal rules with real numbers attached. This page explains the ones that matter for list hygiene — what each rule requires, where safe harbors exist, and where they don't. Read it, then interrogate every vendor who claims otherwise. Including us.
Bastro provides data services, not legal advice. This page is an operator's summary of federal telemarketing rules — bring it to counsel; don't substitute it for counsel.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act gives private plaintiffs a fixed bounty: damages start at $500 per call or text placed in violation, and a court may treble them — up to $1,500 per call — where it finds the violation willful or knowing. A plaintiff never has to show actual harm. Damages stack per call, and class certification multiplies them across every record you dialed.
That bounty produced a professional plaintiff class: individuals who cultivate phone numbers, log every inbound call, and file suit serially. Litigator lists exist because those plaintiffs are identifiable — a small, known set of numbers accounts for an outsized share of TCPA filings. Removing them from a dial list costs fractions of a cent per row. Settling with one of them rarely closes in four figures.
Telemarketing calls to numbers on the federal Do-Not-Call registry are prohibited under 47 CFR § 64.1200. The same rule codifies a safe harbor for the inadvertent call: if a registered number slips through, you can defeat liability by demonstrating the error occurred despite a genuinely maintained compliance practice. The rule is specific about what that practice looks like:
Note what that means: the scrub is one element of four, not the whole defense. Bastro handles the cadence — rescrub any list inside 31 days — and stores the dated job report you'd produce as evidence of routine practice. The written policy and the training remain yours to keep.
Roughly 35 million U.S. phone numbers are disconnected and reassigned each year. Consent attaches to the person who gave it — when the number moves to a stranger, dialing it becomes a violation with none of your paperwork to show. The FCC's Reassigned Numbers Database exists for exactly this: query a number with the date of your consent, and it answers whether the number has been permanently disconnected since. A "no" carries a query safe harbor — if the database is wrong, the caller who relied on it is shielded for that call.
Precision matters here: the query safe harbor attaches to querying the FCC's Reassigned Numbers Database itself. Bastro's relocated-number scrub flags reassigned, disconnected, and ported numbers so stale rows never reach your dialer — treat the scrub as the wide net, and the database query as the sworn answer.
No rule rewards you for removing known litigators from a list, and any vendor implying immunity is selling fiction. The honest case is narrower and still compelling: TCPA filings concentrate in a small population of serial plaintiffs and the firms behind them. A litigator scrub removes the records most likely to convert a compliance mistake into a complaint.
That is risk reduction you can measure — matches flagged, calls never placed, statutory exposure never created — and nothing more. We sell it as exactly that.
Demonstrating a routine business practice is an evidence problem, and evidence is the part most scrub vendors throw away. Bastro keeps it. Every job records what came in, what was checked, what was flagged, and when — attached to the job, retained in your history, downloadable whenever someone asks you to prove it.