DNC litigator

A DNC litigator — sometimes called a serial plaintiff or professional plaintiff — is someone who treats telemarketing rules as a source of income. They may keep several phone numbers, sign up for offers, and then carefully log every call they receive so they can sue dialers who slip up under the TCPA and Do Not Call rules. Because statutory damages stack per call, a single mishandled number, called a few times, can turn into a real legal claim that is cheaper to settle than to fight.

What they look for is predictable: calls to numbers sitting on the National DNC Registry, calls to people who already asked you to stop, and autodialed calls to cell phones without consent. The defense is just good hygiene rather than anything clever. Scrub every campaign against current DNC data on a fresh schedule, honor your Internal DNC the moment a request comes in, and keep proof of Express written consent for any number you auto-dial. Litigators thrive on stale lists, ignored opt-outs, and missing paperwork, and they often test the same business more than once to see whether the first opt-out was actually honored.

Hardening a VICIdial campaign

In VICIdial, attach a current DNC list to every campaign, make sure the agent dispositions that mean "do not call" write back to your internal list immediately, and respect the Cellphone calling rule by gating mobile numbers behind documented consent. Re-scrub before each new dialing session rather than once at upload, since registry status can change between loads. Keeping these steps automated means a human never has to remember them mid-shift, which is exactly when a missed opt-out becomes a lawsuit. It also helps to log when each scrub ran and against which registry, because being able to show a clean, dated process is often what makes a claim go away. This is operational guidance, not legal advice.