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SMS Compliance Known Litigator Detection

Under the TCPA, it is unlawful to send marketing text messages to consumers without their prior express written consent. Violations can result in significant statutory damages — up to $1,500 per message — making the law a prime target for opportunistic plaintiffs, commonly referred to as "known litigators."

As part of Iterable’s commitment to helping you stay SMS compliant, we’ve added a new feature that enables you to detect known litigators in your Iterable lists and prevent them from receiving the SMS campaigns you send with Iterable. In concert with other SMS best practices, this can help you avoid exposure to potential legal action and penalties.

# In this article

# How it works

With Known Litigator Detection enabled, Iterable runs a check each time you send an SMS campaign. At send time, Iterable compares your SMS campaign's send list against a list of phone numbers that are associated with ongoing or past TCPA litigation. If any of the phone numbers on your send list match those of known litigators, Iterable does the following:

  • Suppresses each match from the SMS campaign's send list
  • Generates a send skip event for each match with the reason KnownLitigator
  • Adds the knownLitigatorFilter field to the user profile of each match

The knownLitigatorFilter user profile field can be set to LT1, LT2, or LT3. The LT1 value denotes high confidence that the phone number has been involved in TCPA litigation, while the value LT2 denotes a lower confidence level. If a user is detected as both LT1 and LT2, the field will be updated to LT3. To protect your organization from potential litigation, Iterable suppresses SMS sends to all users who have the knownLitigatorFilter field set on their profile (regardless of whether the value is LT1, LT2, or LT3).

# Sample flagged user profile

{
"itblInternal": {
"documentCreatedAt": "2023-06-30 21:47:20 +00:00",
"documentUpdatedAt": "2025-10-27 22:01:20 +00:00",
"emailDomain": "iterable.com",
"isAnonymousUser": false,
"isUnknownUser": false,
"knownLitigatorFilter": LT2,
"phoneCountry": "US",
"phoneType": "FIXED_LINE_OR_MOBILE",
"regionCode": "US"
}

# Sample send skip event

{
  "email": "sample.user@example.com",
  "eventName": "smsSendSkip",
  "dataFields": {
    "createdAt": "2025-08-07 18:49:48 +00:00",
    "reason": "KnownLitigator",
    "campaignId": 729390,
    "messageId": "9c438a20d26e4e9f8ad4edea23f811cd",
    "email": "sample.user@example.com"
  }
}

# Enabling Known Litigator Detection

To enable Known Litigator Detection, go to Project Settings > SMS & WhatsApp, and enable Check for Known Litigators.

Once enabled, Known Litigator Detection will be enabled for all new SMS campaigns created in your project.

# Viewing known litigators in your project

To generate a list of known litigators in your project, go to Audience > Segmentation, and set up a query that searches for users that have the knownLitigatorFilter field on their user profile.

You can use whichever comparator makes sense for your desired query and be as general or specific as you like to find the group of known litigators you're interested in. For example, to see a list of all known litigators in your project, you might set up a query where the knownLitigatorFilter user profile field Is Set. If you want to see a list of only the known litigators in your project with the LT1 confidence rating, you could set up a query where the knownLitigatorFilter field Equals "LT1".

You can save the results of your search as a static or dynamic list, just like you would with any other segmentation query.

# Analytics and reporting

You can view the total number of send skips that occurred for an SMS campaign due to the suppression of known litigators on the Campaign Analytics page.

# Current feature limitations

Because Iterable scrubs lists at send time, only those users to whom you attempt to send an SMS campaign can be flagged as known litigators. This means that if the same phone number exists on multiple user profiles, but an SMS campaign only attempts to send to one of them, only that first profile is flagged as a known litigator.

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