TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act)
U.S. federal law restricting telemarketing calls, autodialed calls, prerecorded messages, and text messages without prior express written consent.
Full Definition
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), enacted in 1991 and codified at 47 U.S.C. § 227, regulates how businesses contact consumers by phone, text, and fax. For insurance marketing, TCPA requires "prior express written consent" before placing any autodialed call, prerecorded call, or SMS to a consumer's wireless number for solicitation purposes. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) promulgates TCPA rules; the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) enforces the related Telemarketing Sales Rule. Statutory damages are $500 per violation, trebled to $1,500 per willful or knowing violation — and TCPA class actions routinely settle in the seven- to nine-figure range. State attorneys general and private plaintiffs can sue. For insurance agents, the practical implication is: never call a consumer from a purchased list without documented, time-stamped consent language naming the seller and the buyer. Consent must be specific, not bundled.
Example
An agent buys a shared lead from a vendor whose TrustedForm certificate shows the consumer checked a box at 2:14 PM consenting to be contacted by "InsureLeads and its marketing partners." That signed consent is the legal basis for the agent to autodial the consumer within the TCPA safe harbor.
How Agents Apply This
For working agents, TCPA compliance comes down to three operational habits: (1) only dial leads from vendors who can produce a TrustedForm or Jornaya LeadID certificate naming your agency as a consented party, (2) store those certificates for at least four years — the TCPA statute of limitations — ideally inside your CRM record so you can retrieve them in a TCPA demand letter response within 48 hours, and (3) configure your dialer to enforce manual-dial for any record missing documented consent. Most TCPA lawsuits against insurance agencies are won or lost on record-keeping, not intent. Agencies that treat consent certificates as a compliance asset — auditable, timestamped, and tied to every outbound dial — rarely lose TCPA cases. Those that rely on vendor attestations without pulling the underlying certificate settle for five- to seven-figure amounts.
Common Misconceptions
TCPA consent is not the same as DNC scrubbing. A number can be on the National DNC Registry and still be lawfully called if the consumer gave prior express written consent. Conversely, DNC-clean numbers still require TCPA consent for autodialed or prerecorded marketing calls.
Related Terms
- Prior Express Written Consent (PEWC) — A TCPA-defined standard of consent requiring a signed, written agreement that clearly authorizes autodialed or prerecorded marketing calls and texts.
- DNC (Do Not Call) — A federal registry of phone numbers that have opted out of most telemarketing calls, administered by the FTC.
- FCC One-to-One Consent Rule — A 2024 FCC rule that requires TCPA consent to name a single seller, closing the "lead generator loophole" that allowed bundled consent across hundreds of partners.
- TrustedForm — A consent-capture product from ActiveProspect that records a video-like replay of a consumer's interaction with a lead form as evidence of TCPA consent.
- Jornaya LeadID — A competing consent-capture product (now part of Verisk) that generates a unique LeadID token documenting the consumer's interaction with a lead form.