Compliance
What the rules say about calling and texting your registrants
Updated
This is the compliance section: what the United States rules require of anyone who calls or texts a person who registered for a webinar, described from named primary sources with a link on every one. Two pages sit under it. One answers whether the calls and texts are lawful at all. The other answers what the registration form on your own website has to contain.
One answer is worth having before you click into either. An AI voice does not sit outside these rules, and it is not banned by them. Since February 2024 the FCC has treated an AI-generated, human-sounding voice as an artificial voice under the TCPA, holding that “callers must obtain prior express consent from the called party before making a call that utilizes artificial or prerecorded voice simulated or generated through AI technology”[1]. Every rule that has governed prerecorded calls since 1991 governs an AI call too.
This is not legal advice
With that said, this section is homework rather than a hazard briefing. The rules are public, they are older than the technology, and an operator who has read them is simply better prepared than one who has not.
Which page answers which question?
Two pages, split the way the questions actually arrive. The first is asked by people who received a call as much as by operators wondering whether they may place one. The second is asked once somebody has decided to, and it is about a document on their own website rather than about us.
- Is it legal to call and text webinar registrants? — the consent standards that apply to a call or a text after someone registers, the rules that bind regardless of consent, the National Do Not Call Registry, and where liability lands when a vendor calls on a seller’s behalf.
- What your opt-in form must say — what the regulation’s definition of prior express written consent actually contains, why the business named on the form decides who the permission runs to, and what has to be retrievable when somebody asks you to prove it.
- TCPA and AI voice calls — how the rules treat a call placed with a synthetic voice, what changes when the call is a pitch rather than a confirmation, and the obligations that hold whatever the recipient agreed to earlier.
- Who is liable when a vendor calls on your behalf? — where responsibility sits between the seller whose offer is being sold and the vendor placing the call, and why the answer decides how permission has to be captured.
| Page | What it covers | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|
| Is it legal to call and text registrants | The consent standard each kind of contact falls under, the mechanics rules that bind whatever the registrant agreed to, and the two separate theories under which a vendor and a seller are each exposed | Assess your campaign. It describes what the sources say; it makes no finding about anybody's list, script or records |
| What your opt-in form must say | The elements the regulation's own definition contains, why consent runs to the specific business named on the form and can never be pooled, and what an evidence file has to hold | Hand you a clause to paste. A consent sentence has to be drafted against your own entity, offer and jurisdictions by a lawyer, not lifted from a vendor page |
Neither page ends by telling you that you are fine. That is not caution for its own sake — we have never seen your registration form, so any such conclusion would be invented.
Why publish this when almost nobody in the category does?
Because the position was sitting open. When we swept the Meta Ad Library for the AI-calling offers adjacent to ours, three claims came back again and again — fast, always on, cheaper than a person — and exactly one advertiser in the set led with compliance.
That is a finding about advertising, and we are not going to dress it up as a finding about risk. It says nothing about how likely anything is to go wrong for you. What it says is that the subject is unglamorous, checkable, and therefore mostly skipped — which makes doing the reading in public a cheap way to be different.
Competence, not a warning label
How should you read a compliance page written by a vendor?
Sceptically, with three tests that need no legal training. They are the tests these pages were written to pass, and they work just as well on somebody else’s.
- Does it name the source at paragraph level? “The FCC says” is not a source. “FCC 24-17 ¶5” is, and it takes one click to check.
- Does it link to the primary document rather than to its own earlier article about the document?
- Does it conclude that you are fine?A page that reaches a verdict on your compliance has made an assessment it could not have made — it has never seen your form. That is the tell.
Three figures recur across this section more than any others. Each is a link rather than an assertion, which is the whole point.
One more distinction runs through all four pages and is worth knowing before you open any of them. Law is law and practice is practice, and they are labelled separately. What we do on calls — permission captured per client in that client’s own name and never pooled, an assistant that says it is an assistant, an opt-out treated as an instruction rather than as an objection — is our practice. It is not a representation about anybody else’s setup, and it is not a claim that following it makes a campaign compliant.
Frequently asked questions
No. Every page here describes what a named statute, regulation, FCC order or court opinion says, and links to the document so you can read it yourself. It is not a legal opinion, it creates no lawyer-client relationship, and it does not tell you whether your own consent language, your records or your list satisfy any of it.
No, and treat anyone who will with suspicion. Nobody can assess a consent posture without seeing the form as it was actually displayed, its version history, the timestamps behind it and where the list came from. A vendor who tells you that you are fine has made an assessment they were not in a position to make. What these pages give you is the shape of the bar, so that you and a TCPA attorney can check your own page against it.
No. The registration form is the load-bearing artifact of the whole arrangement, and it lives on your domain, in your name. Under the regulation's own definition, prior express written consent is an agreement authorising a named seller — which is why permission is captured per client, in that client's own name, and can never be pooled or reused across clients. We can describe what the definition contains. We cannot make your consent record good on your behalf.
No. Everything in this section is United States law: the federal statute and its regulations, the FCC's own orders, the FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule, and named state requirements where a state adds one. None of it transfers to another jurisdiction, and the pages say so rather than implying a global answer.
Because a page that half-cites is worse than no page. Each one takes a question that arrives repeatedly and reads it end to end against primary sources, which is slow. The section grows one sourced question at a time rather than by filling out a topic list.
If you arrived here because you received one of these calls, the two documents worth asking about are the consent record and the suppression log, and is it legal to call and text registrants explains why. If you arrived as an operator, the honest next step is your own form in front of a TCPA attorney, and what your opt-in form must say is what to bring to that conversation. What our assistant says, word for word, is on what it says, and which segment page applies to you is on who this fits. Once more, plainly: nothing in this section is legal advice, and none of it assesses anybody’s compliance posture.
Founder & Operator, CallHush
Founder and operator of CallHush. The offer is one sentence: you run a webinar, and we increase your show-up rate and your post-webinar sales with an AI voice and SMS system. CallHush has no closed clients yet — the first engagement is a pilot run as a split of the client’s own registrant list, and nothing on this site is presented as a client result.
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