SMS marketing – Bring To Market

$9.8 Million in Two Texting Settlements: The Growth Playbook Gaps Behind Teleflora and Coast Dental

SMS is one of the highest-converting channels a growth team can run. It is also one of the easiest to get sued over. Two settlements disclosed in October 2026 put a combined price of up to about $9.8 million on two ordinary-looking gaps in texting programs.

The two cases

Teleflora, $6 million. In Carter v. Teleflora LLC (Miami-Dade County Circuit Court, Case No. 2026-012979-CA-01), Teleflora agreed to settle claims that it sent promotional texts to people who never provided their numbers and whose numbers were on the National Do Not Call Registry. The class covers people who received more than one promotional text within 12 months, starting May 9, 2021, on a number registered for at least 30 days. The estimated payout is about $251 per class member. Teleflora denies wrongdoing. The final approval hearing is November 25, 2026.

Coast Dental, up to $3.84 million. In Chaviano v. Coast Dental Services, LLC, filed in Florida in July 2026, Coast Dental agreed to pay up to $3,840,664 over appointment-related texts and calls allegedly sent after consumers replied STOP. The claims were brought under the TCPA and the Florida Telephone Solicitation Act. The class is roughly 24,308 people, each eligible for up to $59 in cash or a toothbrush voucher worth up to $99. The final approval hearing is December 9, 2026.

Gap one: list acquisition without suppression

Teleflora’s fact pattern is a familiar growth move: reach people who are not yet customers. When the number did not come from the person, consent is hard to show, and registry status becomes the whole case. If your acquisition plan includes texting numbers you did not collect yourself, the National DNC Registry check belongs in the pipeline, not in a checklist someone forgets.

Gap two: lifecycle messages that ignore opt-outs

Coast Dental’s fact pattern is subtler. Appointment reminders and scheduling nudges feel like service messages, so they often run on a different system or a different team’s automation. The allegation is that people who opted out kept receiving them. For growth teams, the lesson is that an opt-out has to reach every automation that can send to that number, including retention and re-engagement flows.

Why these become class actions

Both cases are defined by a process, not an individual message. When the same gap affects every recipient, it creates a class. Class sizes in the tens of thousands are normal, and that is how a modest per-person payout becomes a multimillion-dollar fund.

What it costs per contact

A quick way to make this real for leadership: both settlements land at a few hundred dollars or less per class member, but the totals run into the millions because the classes are large. Teleflora’s estimated payout is about $251 per person. Coast Dental’s class is roughly 24,308 people. Multiply a small per-contact risk by a big list and the number gets attention fast. That is the case for spending on suppression before scale, not after.

The growth-safe SMS checklist

Document the source and consent for every number in a promotional send.
Scrub non-customer numbers against the National DNC Registry before the first message.
Route STOP replies to a single suppression list that every sending platform reads.
Audit lifecycle and reminder flows, not just campaign blasts.
Screen lists for known litigation risk before launch.

That last item is where TCPALitigatorList.com fits into a growth stack. It lets teams check numbers against known TCPA litigators before a campaign goes out, so the contacts most likely to file are removed upstream. It complements consent capture and DNC scrubbing rather than replacing them.

Takeaway

Neither of these settlements came from a novel legal theory. They came from scale meeting a process gap. Growth teams that build suppression and screening into the pipeline can keep texting aggressively without handing plaintiffs a ready-made class.

Sources

Florida’s Proposed Anti-Spam Act Could Reshape SMS Marketing in a Key Growth State

Florida is one of the largest consumer markets in the U.S. and, for anyone running SMS or outbound programs, one of the most legally complicated. That complexity may be about to grow. On September 17, 2026, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier proposed the Florida Anti-Spam Communications Act, a crackdown on scam calls and texts that would also change how legitimate marketers handle consent and opt-outs in the state.

For growth leaders, the proposal is a signal to revisit SMS strategy before the bill text arrives, not after.

The proposal at a glance

Announced in Pembroke Pines and covered by Spectrum News, WCTV and TCPAWorld, the proposal centers on fraud: impersonation of government agencies, spoofed caller ID, fake warrants sent by text and undisclosed AI voices used to obtain money. High-volume or high-loss schemes would become heightened felonies with mandatory prison time, and possessing or importing phone farms or SIM farms would itself be a felony.

The parts that touch marketers more directly:

Florida’s telemarketing consent law would be tightened.
STOP requests would have to be honored “within days instead of weeks.”
Carriers would have to authenticate caller ID, respond to traceback requests and stop carrying a named unlawful campaign after written notice.
Selling stolen lists used to target Florida numbers would be a separate civil violation.
The Department of Legal Affairs would gain independent authority to investigate and to seek injunctions, restitution and civil penalties.

According to Spectrum News, Uthmeier said his statewide prosecution team recovered “about $10 million for victims” over the past year. He also said he expects an AI legislative package “this year.” No bill number, sponsor or session timeline had been published as of late September.

The growth implications

Opt-out speed becomes a deliverability issue. Today, Florida’s FTSA ties a text-message damages claim to a consumer replying STOP and the sender texting again more than 15 days later, according to TCPAWorld’s analysis of Fla. Stat. 501.059(10)(c). The federal TCPA standard is a reasonable time, not exceeding ten business days. If Florida moves to “days,” every connected tool, from your ESP and SMS platform to your CRM, your dialer and any agency partners, has to share suppression data quickly.

Consent sources will get more scrutiny. A tighter consent law plus a civil violation for selling stolen lists puts pressure on third-party lead buying. Growth teams that rely on aggregators should be ready to show exactly where and how each Florida contact opted in.

Campaign continuity risk. Letting the state direct carriers to cut off a named campaign is aimed at scammers, but TCPAWorld notes that the response deadline and any process to challenge a mistaken notice are not yet known. For a brand running a big seasonal push, an erroneous cutoff could be costly.

Prep checklist for marketing teams

Map every system that can send a message to a Florida number and measure STOP-to-suppression time.
Document consent capture for each lead source, including screenshots, timestamps and language.
Keep sender IDs registered and authenticated with your carriers.
Assign someone to track the bill when it is filed.

Protect your pipeline from serial plaintiffs

Stricter state rules tend to give plaintiffs new theories, and Florida’s FTSA already carries a private right of action. Smart list hygiene is a growth lever as well as a legal one. TCPALitigatorList.com helps marketing and sales teams screen contacts against known TCPA litigators before launching a campaign, so a small number of high-risk contacts don’t turn a profitable channel into a legal expense.

The takeaway

Florida’s proposal is still early, and the final bill could look quite different. But the direction of travel is faster opt-outs, stricter consent and more state enforcement power. Growth teams that operationalize those principles now will keep their Florida channels open whatever the legislature passes.

Sources

Do-Not-Call Lawsuits Are Shrinking in Some Courts. Here’s How Growth Teams Should Read It.

For growth teams that live on outbound calls and SMS, the TCPA’s do-not-call rules have long been one of the most expensive line items on the risk register. Two federal court decisions handed down in the last week of September 2026 suggest that, in at least some courtrooms, that line item is shrinking. Whether it shrinks for your program depends on where your audience lives and how you run your campaigns.

The two rulings

Internicola v. MortgagePros, LLC (M.D. Fla., Sept. 24, 2026). A federal court in Florida held that the TCPA does not give consumers a private right of action for claims based on the National Do-Not-Call Registry. As reported by TCPAWorld, the court read the statute’s private-right provision, Section 227(c)(5), as covering only regulations the FCC prescribed within the nine-month window Congress set in 1991, which closed on September 20, 1992. The national registry did not exist until 2003. The court also held that texts are not “calls” under the provision.

Koeller v. Ox AppSec Security, Inc. (E.D. Mo., Sept. 30, 2026). A Missouri federal court dismissed DNC claims because, in its view, the TCPA’s do-not-call protections for “residential” subscribers do not reach cellphones. Citing Loper Bright and McLaughlin, the court refused to defer to the FCC’s 2003 interpretation that extended residential protection to cell numbers.

Why this matters for go-to-market

DNC claims are the bread and butter of a lot of TCPA filings because they are easy to plead: a number on the registry, two or more marketing contacts in twelve months, and a demand letter follows. If courts keep narrowing that pathway, the economics of plaintiff-side litigation change, and so does the risk profile of high-volume outbound.

But a GTM leader should read these cases the way they read a single A/B test: interesting, directional, not yet conclusive.

Geography is now a variable. TCPAWorld reported on October 5 that California federal courts are still treating SMS as calls for DNC purposes. A text program that is low-risk in one district may be high-risk in another.
The rulings are fragile. The Internicola plaintiff has filed a motion for reconsideration, and neither case is an appellate decision.
Other claims fill the gap. The cases did not touch Section 227(b) robocall and autodialer claims, and state laws such as Florida’s FTSA carry their own private rights of action.

How to adjust your playbook

Look closely at the Internicola facts. The consumer had engaged with the company about a refinance, then withdrew consent on July 1, 2025, and allegedly received just over a dozen calls and texts in the following ten days. That is not a DNC-registry problem at its core. It is a lifecycle problem: a lead who said stop kept getting touched by automated cadences.

For growth teams, that points to three practical moves:

Wire opt-outs directly into your sequencing tools. A stop request in one channel should pause every channel immediately.
Keep registry scrubbing in place. It is cheap insurance against jurisdictions that do not follow these rulings.
Segment by risk. Know which states and area codes your lists concentrate in, and match your cadence intensity to the legal environment.

Know your audience before you reach out

Every growth marketer knows that list quality drives results. In outbound, list quality also drives legal exposure. A small group of repeat plaintiffs generates an outsized share of TCPA lawsuits, and they are adept at shifting legal theories when courts close one door. TCPALitigatorList.com gives sales and marketing teams a way to screen lists against known TCPA litigators before a campaign launches, which removes some of the highest-risk contacts without slowing down the pipeline.

The takeaway

Late September brought real wins for businesses defending DNC claims, and they reflect a broader trend of courts reading the TCPA strictly after Loper Bright. Still, the smartest growth teams will bank the good news without changing their fundamentals: clean consent, fast opt-outs and smarter list hygiene remain the best growth hedge against litigation.

Sources

Why TCPA Lawsuits Are Suddenly More Expensive (and How to Stay Out of Them)

For growth teams running SMS at scale, April 2026 brought a string of headlines that should rewrite your pre-flight checklist. New settlements, new theories, and a striking $3,787-per-claimant payout in one TCPA case have reset both the average cost of getting it wrong and the appetite of plaintiffs’ firms to find new targets.

The economic picture

Recent TCPA resolutions cluster in a now-familiar range: $1M to $10M total fund, with per-claimant payouts that have crept upward as settlements get smaller class definitions. Gen Digital settled prerecorded-message claims for $9.95M. Wilshire Law Firm: up to $5.975M. ASP Aesthetics: $1.32M for sending marketing texts after opt-outs. Nationwide: $1.4M on robocalls. And in one outlier case, claimants split the fund into $3,787-per-person checks.

Add up the legal fees, the cy pres, the operational disruption, and even a “small” TCPA case rarely lands under $500K all-in for the defendant.

The new frontier: quiet hours

The most interesting development is the rise of “quiet hours” class actions. The TCPA prohibits telemarketing calls and texts before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. local time. Plaintiffs’ firms have realized that SMS marketing platforms frequently fire on UTC or server time, not recipient local time — meaning a 7 p.m. Pacific send hits 10 p.m. on the East Coast and creates a class of millions instantly. A new suit against Ruggable targets exactly this pattern.

The growth-team playbook

If you run outbound SMS, four controls catch most of the failure modes plaintiffs are exploiting in 2026. Time-zone-aware scheduling that uses the recipient’s wireless area code to infer local time. STOP-keyword propagation that completes within seconds, not minutes, across channels. DNC scrubs run on every send, not on every list. And a screen against known TCPA litigator databases, performed at the list level before any campaign goes live.

Outbound is still one of the highest-ROI channels in B2C and B2B — but only if your dial list is clean. TCPALitigatorList.com is the de-facto industry list of known TCPA plaintiffs and professional-litigant phone numbers, updated continuously. Marketing and growth teams that scrub their cadences against it before a launch dramatically reduce the odds that a campaign turns into a class action. If you are running outreach at any scale, it belongs in your pre-flight checklist.

Why now

Plaintiffs’ firms have gotten more sophisticated, more aggressive on forum selection, and more creative on theories. The bar for filing has dropped. The smart move for any team running outbound at scale is to assume your campaigns will be audited by an adversary, and build accordingly.