What to do today.

1. Stop

Every phone number in the letter comes off every list, in every system, today. Your dialer, your texting platform, your CRM, your vendor's list. If you cannot be sure the vendor has done it, pause the vendor. The reason is simple: a call made after you were told is the easiest willful violation to prove, and willful is $1,500 instead of $500.

2. Save

Tell everyone who touches your calling or texting, in writing, that nothing gets deleted. Call logs, dialer exports, lead files, consent forms, vendor contracts, emails about the list, STOP replies. Then take a copy of the letter itself, every page and the envelope, and put it somewhere backed up. You will send it to a lawyer, maybe an insurer, maybe a vendor. One paper copy is not a record.

3. Read it properly

Not the number and the deadline. All of it. The entity name. The address. The phone numbers it says you called. The dates. Which statute it cites and which section. Whether it mentions Florida or another state law. What it asks you to do and by when. Whether it offers a figure or asks you to make contact. Write the phone numbers and dates out on a separate sheet. That sheet is what you check against your own logs tomorrow.

4. Write down the deadline

On the letter, on your calendar, with a reminder a week out. Also write today's date on the letter and the postmark if there is one. The deadline is the sender's, not the law's, but it is the date after which the matter moves from "letter" to "referred to someone who files". Most things that go wrong go wrong because nobody owned the date.

5. Tell one person

Your business partner, the owner if you are not the owner, or the person who ran the campaign. One person, today, with a copy. The conversation is awkward. The conversation in a month, when they find out from a court filing, is worse. If you are a manager who ran the calls and the owner does not know, this is the item you are most tempted to skip. Do not skip it.

That is the list. Everything else can wait until tomorrow.

What is not on the list

• Calling the sender. Not today. There is a page on why: should I call them?
• Paying. Not today. You do not know yet what you would be paying for.
• Hiring a lawyer. Soon, not today. Tomorrow's job is to pull your own records so that the first hour with a lawyer is spent on your facts, not on finding them.
• Deciding whether it is a scam. Twenty minutes tomorrow, with the registry and your logs, not tonight on a forum. The checks are on is this a scam?
• Replying in writing. Unless the deadline is inside a week, in which case a three-line acknowledgement asking for time, with a reservation of rights, is fine. Nothing about the facts.

Tomorrow

Pull the call records for every number in the letter. Pull the export for the whole campaign the calls came from. Find whatever consent record exists for each number, if any. Check the sender in the state business registry. Find your insurance policy and read the exclusions. Then you know what you are dealing with, and you can decide who to call. If the calls are yours and there is no consent record, the next step is settling it in writing, not arguing about it.