TCPA Consent Revocation Rules

Consent revocation means a person who once agreed to hear from you takes that permission back. Under the TCPA (the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the federal law that governs autodialed and prerecorded calls), a consumer can revoke consent to receive marketing calls and texts using any reasonable manner. As a TCPA operator you do not get to dictate a single magic word or a special form. If the request is clear, it counts, and you have to act on it. This matters because a single contacted-after-revocation record can turn into a lawsuit, and a DNC litigator watches for exactly this kind of slip.

What VICIdial does when consent is revoked

The FCC gives you 10 days to process a revocation from the date you receive it. In practice that is your worst case, not your target. When an agent hears a revocation on a live call, the fastest path is to set a DNC disposition so the number lands on your Internal DNC list and never gets dialed again. For text-based revocations, your inbound message handler should flag the number the same way. Because the request can arrive by any reasonable means, including a reply text, a voicemail, a portal note, or a verbal statement to whoever picks up, you need one shared place to record it. The cleanest design is a campaign-level and system-level DNC (do not call) entry so the block applies no matter which list or campaign the lead later shows up in.

Train agents to treat revocation as a stop-everything action, not a wrap-up note. A spoken "take me off your list" is a revocation even if the caller never says the word revoke. For the bigger picture of how these pieces fit together, see our VICIdial compliance overview, and for the related set of words that auto-trigger a stop, read the standard opt-out keywords you must honor.

The revocation flow

sequenceDiagram
  participant C as Consumer
  participant A as Agent or SMS
  participant V as VICIdial
  participant D as Internal DNC
  C->>A: Says stop or take me off the list
  A->>V: Set DNC disposition
  V->>D: Add number system wide
  D-->>V: Number blocked
  V-->>A: No further dials within 10 days
  Note over D: Honored on every list and campaign

The flow shows the key point: the revocation enters once, lands on a single blocklist, and then every campaign and list respects it automatically. You do not want each agent or each list deciding on its own.

VICIfast ships with internal DNC and DNC dispositions wired up by default, so a revocation an agent records sticks across your whole account. See pricing to get started with compliant defaults already in place.