Virginia Telephone Privacy Protection Act

A telephone solicitation is a telephone call to a natural person's residence in Virginia, to a landline or wireless telephone with a Virginia area code, or to a telephone registered to a Virginia resident, or a text message to a wireless telephone with a Virginia area code or registered to a Virginia resident, made to offer or advertise property, goods or services for sale, lease, license or investment, including an extension of credit, or for a fraudulent purpose.

Chapter 626 of the 2025 Acts, effective January 1, 2026, recast the Act's duties from telephone solicitation calls to telephone solicitations, and added that a recipient opts out of a text-message solicitation by replying UNSUBSCRIBE or STOP. A telephone solicitor must not initiate a telephone solicitation outside 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. local time at the contacted person's location without that person's prior consent.

On a telephone call, the solicitor must identify themselves by first and last name and name the person on whose behalf the solicitation is made promptly upon making contact.

Every solicitation must transmit the solicitor's telephone number, and its name where the carrier makes it available, and the number must let any individual ask during regular business hours not to receive solicitations; for a text message, a number that accepts a reply-text request not to receive future text messages satisfies this rule.

The solicitor must not act to prevent that transmission or cause false or misleading caller-identification information to display, though it may substitute the seller's name and customer service number. If no live sales representative is available within two seconds of the person's completed greeting on a telephone call, the solicitor must play a prerecorded message stating the name and telephone number of the person on whose behalf the solicitation was made.

A solicitor must not initiate a solicitation to a number whose occupant has said they do not want solicitations made by or for that seller, a request honored for at least ten years and made for a text message by replying UNSUBSCRIBE or STOP, or to a number on the National Do Not Call Registry.

It is an affirmative defense to a do-not-call claim that the defendant established and implemented, with due care, reasonable practices and procedures to prevent such solicitations, including using a version of the Registry obtained no more than 31 days before the call.

For the do-not-call rules only, a telephone solicitation does not include a call made with the person's prior express invitation or permission evidenced by a signed written agreement naming the party and the number, a call for a seller with an established business relationship with the person (a purchase or transaction in the preceding 18 months, or an inquiry or application in the preceding three months), or a call by a solicitor with a personal relationship to the person; the business-relationship and personal-relationship exemptions end once the person has said they do not want solicitations.

Those exemptions do not reach the calling-hour, identification, caller-identification or abandoned-call rules. A seller on whose behalf a solicitation is made and the solicitor who makes it are jointly and severally liable for a violation of the calling-hour, identification, caller-identification or do-not-call rules.

A solicitation is presumed made on the seller's behalf unless the seller shows by clear and convincing evidence that it neither retained nor requested the solicitor's calls and that they were made without its knowledge or consent.

An aggrieved natural person may sue a responsible person to enjoin a violation and recover $500 for a first violation, $1,000 for a second and $5,000 for each later violation, which a court may raise to as much as $5,000 for a willful first or second violation, plus reasonable attorney fees and court costs.

The Attorney General, an attorney for the Commonwealth or a locality's attorney may sue for the same damages for aggrieved persons, and on a willful violation a court may also assess a civil penalty of not more than $5,000 for each violation, paid into the Literary Fund or the locality's general fund.