Proving the Form Is Not Proving the Call
A consent certificate proves someone filled in a form. It says nothing about what your vendor's agent said next, and that is the half you get sued over.
- A consent certificate documents the form. Almost every TCPA content violation happens on the call that comes after it, and nothing in your stack documents that.
- Under Federal Rule of Evidence 901(a), the burden of showing a recording is what you say it is sits with you, the party producing it. A raw audio file gives a court your word and little else.
- A Klariqo Call Record is the same kind of artifact as a consent certificate, aimed at the call instead of the form: signed, independently timestamped, portable, verifiable by anyone. It is free for your first 10,000 recorded calls.
You already pay to prove consent. Every lead that reaches your dialer carries a certificate documenting the moment somebody filled in a form, and when a demand letter arrives that certificate is the first thing your counsel pulls.
Then your vendor's agent picks up the phone, and for the next six minutes you have no idea what happens.
That is the gap. Not the consent, which you bought and documented, but the conversation, which you are liable for and cannot see.
What the certificate actually covers
TrustedForm, now part of ActiveProspect alongside Jornaya and Infutor, does its job well. It captures a session snapshot of the page the consumer saw, the box they ticked and the disclosure text sitting beside it, then wraps that into a certificate your counsel can produce later.
For proving somebody opted in, it works. That is the whole design and it is not in question here.
What it does not do is follow the lead into the call, and the call is where content rules break. Mid-call revocation gets talked past. A required disclosure gets skipped because the agent is behind on quota. Somebody freelances a promise the brand never authorised. None of that touches the form, so none of it touches the certificate.
Worth knowing about the certificate's own lifespan, because most buyers assume it sits there indefinitely. Per ActiveProspect's own documentation, a certificate expires three days after creation. It extends to 90 days only when they confirm the consumer actively submitted the form, and reaches five years only if you pay to Retain it, hosted on their servers and reached through your account.
None of that is hidden and none of it is unreasonable. It is worth stating plainly because the artifact you are relying on has a clock, and it is shorter than most people assume.
The part that costs money
Statutory damages under the TCPA run $500 per violating call, rising to $1,500 where a court finds the violation willful.
Those are per-call numbers, which is what makes them dangerous on a dialer. A vendor running 2,000 calls a day for you, with one campaign misconfigured for a week, is 10,000 calls. Nobody collects the theoretical maximum, but that arithmetic is what goes in the demand letter, and it is the number that decides whether your counsel settles.
Now ask the question that actually matters when it lands: can you show what was said on the specific call they are naming?
Most buyers cannot. The vendor holds the recording, human QA hears somewhere around two calls in a hundred, and the disputed one is essentially never in that sample. You end up asking the party under investigation to hand you the evidence that will be used to judge you.
Federal Rule of Evidence 901, and why "here is the recording" keeps getting weaker
Rule 901(a) is short: the proponent must produce evidence sufficient to support a finding that the item is what the proponent claims it is.
Read it as the operator rather than the lawyer. You are the proponent. The burden of showing the file is genuine sits with the party producing it, and that party is you. The bar is not high, a prima facie showing rather than proof beyond doubt, but it is yours to clear rather than theirs to disprove.
That was easy to clear when audio was hard to fake. It is getting harder. Courts and commentators are actively working through what authentication means now that a convincing recording can be generated on a laptop, and opposing counsel does not have to prove your file was edited. They only have to make a judge wonder.
A raw WAV answers that with your word, and that is the whole answer it has.
What a Klariqo Call Record does instead
A Klariqo Call Record is the same species of artifact as a consent certificate, pointed at the call rather than the form.
Every recorded call comes back as a signed file holding a SHA-512 hash of the audio, the transcript, and a quality score against the rulebook you wrote. It is witnessed on JLINC and sealed with an independent RFC 3161 trusted timestamp from DigiCert, the standard underneath legal e-signatures. Change one byte and the signature breaks, so there is no version where the record is quietly altered and still validates.
The properties that matter to a buyer are the boring ones:
| Consent certificate | Klariqo Call Record | |
|---|---|---|
| Documents | the form submission | the conversation |
| Lifespan | 3 days, 90 confirmed, 5 years paid | 10 years |
| Where it lives | the vendor's servers | a file you hold |
| To check it | log into your account | anyone, no account, offline |
| Coverage | every lead | every recorded call, not a 2% sample |
| Cost | per certificate | free for your first 10,000 recorded calls |
That last row is what changes the shape of the problem. While the record cost money per call, mandating it across forty vendors meant asking forty companies to buy something. It no longer does, and that is the same mechanic that put consent certificates on essentially every lead form in this industry: the buyer made it a condition of getting paid, and the cost of compliance was low enough that nobody fought it.
Being straight about what neither of these does
Neither artifact makes anybody compliant. A certificate does not make your consent valid, and a call record does not make a call lawful. Both are evidence, and evidence is what you reach for after somebody disputes something.
They also do not substitute for each other. A consent certificate says nothing about what an agent said, and a call record says nothing about whether the upstream opt-in was genuine. If you buy web-sourced leads and dial them, you need both, and today you almost certainly hold one.
That is not a knock on ActiveProspect. They built the certificate for the form and it does that job. Nobody built the equivalent for the call, which is the actual point.
FAQ
Does TrustedForm prove what was said on the phone call? No. A TrustedForm certificate documents the web-form consent event, capturing the page and disclosure the consumer saw. It contains nothing about the call that follows.
How long does a TrustedForm certificate last? Per ActiveProspect's documentation, three days from creation by default, extending to 90 days if they confirm the consumer actively submitted the form, and five years only if you pay to Retain it on their servers.
Who has to prove a call recording is genuine? Under Federal Rule of Evidence 901(a), the party producing the recording. The standard is a prima facie showing that the item is what its proponent claims, so the burden sits with you rather than with whoever is challenging it.
What are TCPA damages per call? $500 per violating call, rising to $1,500 where a court finds the violation willful or knowing.
Can a buyer require call records from their vendors? Yes, and it costs those vendors nothing. The record is free for the first 10,000 recorded calls, which is what makes it something a brand can write into a vendor agreement rather than something each vendor has to be sold on.
Do I still need consent certification if I have call records? Yes. They document different events. Certificates cover the opt-in, call records cover the conversation, and outbound teams working web-sourced leads need both.
Prove the half nobody is covering
Upload one of your own calls and get a signed record back in about a minute, with no account and no sales call. Then hand it to somebody and let them verify it without trusting you or us.
Prove what was said on every call.
Turn one of your own calls into a signed, tamper-evident record you can verify yourself.