Candidates who opted into messaging from Paradox and its clients may at some point have a deactivated phone number. When this occurs, their phone numbers will no longer be owned by them and goes back to the carriers, allowing other people to use that number. This can potentially cause issues when they previously opted in to receive Paradox messages and those messages continue past when they no longer own that phone number.

What are deactivated numbers?

When a phone plan subscriber ends their subscription or transfers their number to a different mobile/wireless carrier, the original carrier will mark the number as having been “deactivated” or “retired”. The deactivated numbers are eventually recycled and reassigned to new owners, but if we are not aware, we may send an SMS to a different person than the original owner of the number who signed up for Paradox or client account messaging. This means that a number that previously did opt in to messaging programs may now belong to a different person who has not consented to receiving any messaging.

Deactivated number process

In order to remain compliant with laws and regulations relating to opt-in consent, we can only message people who have opted into receive messages. This means we should not be sending messages to phone numbers that have been deactivated or now belong to a different person than the initial person that opted into messaging.

We use Twilio’s deactivation protocol API to retrieve a list of phone numbers that carriers have confirmed are deactivated by the end user. If any of the phone numbers currently belonging to candidates or users are found on the list of deactivated numbers, they are then removed from our system. Deactivated numbers can no longer receive notifications from the CEM unless the new owner of the number decides to create a profile with Paradox or its client accounts.

CEM visibility

Candidate or user profiles that have phone numbers known to have been deactivated will have text denoting that the number was deactivated in the Phone Number field. These profiles will not have phone numbers available anymore, and the CEM cannot send SMS messages to profiles that do not have a phone number.