Palm Beach Tan is about to be out of pocket $2.5MM following a TCPA settlement related to sending SMS messages after receipt of a stop notification but the bigger story may be the list of “stop” requests listed in the agreement.

First, the case is Hudson v. Palm Beach Tan, Inc., No. 1:23-cv-00486-UA-JEP, (M.D.N.C.) and each class member is set to receive up to $1,500.00– a huge windfall considering SMS may no longer even be covered by the TCPA’s DNC provisions.

Class counsel in this one is Lemberg Law LLC– it has been a while since we have seen him on the scoreboard with a large class resolution but it looks like he’s back in a big way.

Interestingly, the class is defined as “all persons within the Class Period sent a Palm Beach Tan Text Message after that phone number sent an inbound text message Stop Request.”

This is a bit of unusual class definition focusing on the transmission (rather than receipt) of a stop notification to PBT.

But here’s the key– the definition of Stop Request includes:

“stop,” “stopall,” “unsubscribe,” “unsub,” “cancel,” “canceled,” “end,” “quit,” “revoke,” “cease,” “optout,” “opt out,” “opt-out,” “opted out,” “opt stop,” “block,” “blocked,” “leave,” “no,” “pause,” “do not,” “don’t want,” “don’t text,” “don’t,” “help,” “desist,” “remove,” “take me off,” “take off,” “off,” “exit,” “delete,” “decline,” “halt,” “discontinue,” “terminate,” “withdraw,” “refuse,” “lose,” “not consent,” “illegal,” “violate,” “violation,” “harassment,” “harassing,” “wrong,” or any profanity or expletive cease directive, in any combination of upper and lower case letters, or any variant thereof, including variants where such words or phrases are misspelled, where such words or phrases comprise only part of the inbound text message, or where the inbound text message includes a stop sign emoji.

Little free advice– if your system doesn’t honor each of these response types as an opt out you are potentially in big trouble. So be smart!

Deadline to make a claim or opt out of this one is October 4, 2026.