If you run a scrub and it comes back with a 0.4% litigator hit rate on a 50,000-contact list, that's 200 numbers. Two hundred people. Most senders read that number, shrug, suppress them, and move on. But it's worth understanding what those 200 flags actually are — because a litigator hit and a DNC hit are answering two completely different questions, and confusing them is how people who thought they were compliant end up in a demand letter.
Full disclosure: I work for Ready, and we sell a standalone TCPA/DNC litigator scrub at $0.005 per contact. So I have a horse in this race. But the distinction I'm about to walk through is true whether you scrub with us, a competitor, or nobody — and if you send cold or aged lists in a high-risk vertical, it's the difference between two risks you probably think are one.
A DNC hit answers "did this person ask not to be contacted?"
The Do-Not-Call registry — federal, state, and your own internal suppression list — is a preference list. A number lands on it because someone registered it, or told a business to stop, or filed a complaint. A DNC hit is a signal about intent: this person, at some point, indicated they don't want marketing contact.
That's genuinely useful. Texting someone who's on the DNC and has no prior relationship with you is a straightforward TCPA and TSR problem. But the DNC list has gaps that trip people up constantly — it skews toward landlines, misses reassigned wireless numbers, and doesn't cover the state-specific and internal lists regulators actually check first. We've written about what the federal DNC list misses and why your internal do-not-call list matters more than the federal one.
The key thing: a DNC hit tells you about a preference. It does not tell you whether that person has ever done anything about a violation.
A litigator hit answers "has this person sued over a text before?"
A known-litigator database is a completely different animal. These lists are built from court records, demand-letter patterns, and serial-plaintiff tracking. A litigator flag means this specific number belongs to someone with a documented history of filing TCPA claims — or a professional plaintiff who effectively farms unsolicited texts for settlements.
That's not a preference signal. It's a behavior signal. A litigator flag doesn't mean "this person doesn't want your text." It means "if this person gets your text, there's a meaningfully higher chance the next thing you receive is a demand letter." We dug into exactly what a litigator hit actually means — it's not a stop sign, it's a risk premium on that one contact.
Here's why you can't collapse the two lists into one:
| DNC hit | Litigator hit | |
|---|---|---|
| What it signals | Contact preference | Litigation behavior |
| Source | Registry + complaints + internal | Court records + serial-plaintiff tracking |
| The risk it catches | Contacting someone who opted out | Contacting someone who sues over it |
| Can a number pass one and fail the other? | Yes | Yes |
That last row is the whole point. A number can be totally clean on the DNC and still be a known litigator. Plenty of serial plaintiffs deliberately keep their numbers off the DNC — an unregistered number that receives an unsolicited text is a cleaner claim. If you only scrub DNC, you've filtered the people who asked to be left alone and kept the people who are financially motivated to be contacted. That's backwards. We laid out that exact trap in a number can pass DNC and still sue you.
Why both lists have to run before a single send
The violation happens on send, not on import. One text to a flagged number is the actionable event — not having the number in your database. So the scrub has to happen before the first message goes out, not after you notice a reply that reads like it was written by a paralegal. We're blunt about this in scrubbing after you import a list is too late.
When you run Ready's scrub, each contact is checked against both known-litigator lists and DNC-complainer lists in one pass, at $0.005 per contact, and matches are auto-suppressed before send. You pay only for what you scrub — no subscription, no minimum. That matters because the right cadence isn't "once, forever."
How to read hit rates by list source
The single biggest variable in what your scrub returns is where the list came from. A hit rate that's alarming on one source is normal on another.
Rough, industry-approximate patterns — treat these as directional, not gospel:
- Opt-in / organically grown lists: litigator hits are low, often well under 0.1%. These people gave you a number on purpose.
- Purchased or rented lists: litigator hits run several times higher — we've seen the pattern where purchased lists flag roughly 5x more litigators than opt-in lists. Serial plaintiffs seed their numbers into exactly the data brokers cold buyers pull from.
- Skip-traced lists (real estate, wholesaling): high risk, because there's often no consent at all — the number was inferred, not given. One cold text here is its own problem before you even get to litigators. See the consent reality wholesalers keep ignoring.
And source isn't the only axis — age is. A list you bought eight months ago has a higher litigator concentration today than it did on day one, because plaintiffs keep entering the databases and reassigned numbers keep churning. The scrub-timing math on aged lists shows why a one-time cleanse decays, and why a re-scrub cadence beats a single pass.
So when you read a hit rate, ask two questions before you decide whether it's "high": where did this list come from, and how old is it? A 0.05% litigator rate on a fresh opt-in list is expected. The same rate on an 8-month-old purchased list probably means your scrub is stale.
The math, because this is a spend decision
Scrubbing 50,000 contacts at $0.005 is $250. That's the whole cost of checking the entire list against both databases.
Now the other side. TCPA statutory damages run $500 to $1,500 per text. A single litigator you didn't suppress, who receives one message, is already a multiple of your entire scrub bill. Ten of them turning into a consolidated claim is a number that ends businesses. We ran the full comparison in scrubbing 100,000 contacts costs $500, one complaint costs $500–$1,500 per text.
I want to be honest about the limits here, though. A scrub is risk reduction, not immunity. It suppresses the known litigators and DNC-complainers on the lists as they exist today. It does not:
- Manufacture consent you never had
- Catch a plaintiff whose number isn't yet in any database
- Replace quiet-hours enforcement or a real opt-in trail
Scrubbing is one layer. Consent and quiet hours are the other two, and they're not optional — the three layers of TCPA risk reduction fit together, and dropping any one of them leaves an opening the other two can't cover. Compliance is ultimately the sender's responsibility; the scrub just narrows the odds on the riskiest contacts.
What you're actually buying for $0.005
You're buying an answer to two questions at once:
- Did this person ask not to be contacted? (DNC)
- Has this person sued over a text before? (litigator)
Those are different risks, caught by different lists, and a number can pass one while failing the other. If you've been scrubbing DNC only and thinking you were covered, you've been filtering the wrong half — the people motivated to sue are precisely the ones who keep their numbers off the DNC.
The practical move: before your next cold or aged-list send, run both. If you don't send SMS through us, you can still use the scrub as a standalone product — it works whether or not you text through Ready, which we cover in when standalone scrubbing pays for itself. If you do want it bundled with sends, quiet-hours enforcement, and 10DLC, it lives inside the Ready SMS platform, and you can start with 2,500 free credits to see how the numbers land on your own list before you spend anything.
Two hundred flags on a 50,000-contact list isn't a rounding error. It's two hundred reasons to spend the $250.