US Carrier Penalties for non-compliance of 10DLC messaging

10DLC registration is mandatory for unrestricted texting. Here is a list of US Carrier Penalties for non-compliance with 10DLC messaging.

Telecom carriers across the US have adopted a set of standards and registration processes for 10DLC numbers to understand better A2P practitioners and what they’re sending across the network. The idea is to provide reliability, security, better throughput, and deliverability rates for the businesses and their audience with low risk.

With this, messaging campaigns that use non-10DLC numbers may be subject to penalties if they violate the traffic. 

We have listed below the penalties that will be charged by the carriers for violating the acceptable usage policies. 

Acceptable Policy Breach -

The carriers have brought together an acceptable use-case policy by which you cannot send messages across the carriers, including spamming and phishing. This policy also forbids the user from sending messages that include Sex, Hate Speech, Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco, commonly referred to as SHAFT violations. 

Violating this policy may lead to a penalty of up to $10000/violation. 

If your SMS campaigns include the above content, you will be priorly notified through an email from the Support team. If the violation is repeated on your campaign, the fees will be passed onto you through our carriers. 

Messaging Program Evasion - 

Using multiple numbers to send the same messages across the network, thereby decreasing the reputation of the number, is considered to be a Messaging Program Evasion violation. 

This also includes messages that have intentionally misspelled words or Opt-out contents to evade filtering by the carriers. 

Violating this policy will lead to a $1000 fine up front. 

Grey Route Penalties - When you send a message from your campaign, the message is validated from your network carrier to the destination's network carrier and then delivered to the recipient. 

However, in cases of messaging in a single country, there are chances that the carrier route messages route to another country and then sends it to the recipient to considerably cut off the messaging charges and possibly evade telecom regulations. This is Grey Routing. 

Although Grey routing is not completely illegal, it violates the telecom regulations set by a specific country to avoid any wrongdoings by the users. 

Grey route charges are not implemented yet but will be introduced by the telecom carriers across the US this year. 

Grey routing penalties will be charged at $10/message. 

How to avoid Carrier penalties for non-compliant messaging?

Although 10DLC is the most suitable answer to this, we also suggest you send messages that do not violate our use case policies. You may navigate to https://callhub.io/terms/ and check the Usage Policy for a better understanding. Also, you may refer to our detailed guide for steps to avoid getting filtered by the carriers.