What a lead vendor owes you when a lead is bad

A lead vendor owes you what your agreement with it says, and federal telemarketing rules add nothing to that. No FTC or FCC rule sets a return window, a credit, or a duty to send another lead in place of a bad one. Contract and consumer protection law sit alongside the agreement and are a dispute rather than a policy. So the answer to what you are owed is the order you signed.

Why the remedy sits in the agreement and not in a rule

The remedy for a bad lead is whatever the agreement between buyer and vendor provides. The Federal Trade Commission's own account of this market describes aggregators maintaining contractual relationships with their clients, the terms of which specify the types of leads the buyer is willing to purchase. Terms decide it, and the report goes no further than that.

Two different things get blurred together here, and they behave differently under pressure. The first is the commercial remedy: a credit against a future order, another lead in its place, or cash. It exists because your order says it does, and it stops exactly where your order stops. The second is a legal claim, which you would bring as a dispute over misrepresentation or breach and which turns on what the vendor told you rather than on a returns policy. You can hold a vendor to the first because you bought it. The second is a matter for a lawyer, and no page on a vendor's site makes it automatic.

Source: FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection, "Follow the Lead" Workshop, Staff Perspective, September 2016, on the Commission's workshop of 30 October 2015, read in full on 20 September 2026 at ftc.gov. It supports the statement that aggregators frequently maintain contractual relationships with their clients, the terms of which specify the types of leads the buyer is willing to purchase. It says nothing about returns, credits, windows or remedies of any kind, and it addresses lead generation broadly rather than mortgage specifically.

Which defects a vendor can check against its own file

A vendor can check a defect only where its own file already holds the answer. Delivery timestamps, the state and loan purpose recorded against your order, whether the same contact reached you before, and the consent record attached to the submission all sit in its system. Anything that rests on how the call went does not.

That split decides which disputes close in a day and which turn into an argument nobody wins. A disconnected number, a duplicate, a state you are not licensed in and a loan purpose your order excluded are all verifiable on both sides of the table. Which leads count as bad in the first place is a separate question with its own answer, and a dispute that starts by arguing about the definition has already gone wrong. A consumer who says they never filled in a form is the hard case, because several unrelated things produce that same sentence and only some of them are the vendor's doing.

The consent record a return depends on, and who has to keep it

Ask for the consent record when the lead arrives rather than when a dispute starts. Federal telemarketing rules already describe what a complete one contains, and the duty to keep it falls on the seller, which in a lead purchase means the lender placing the calls rather than the vendor supplying the name.

16 CFR 310.5(a)(8) sets out what a complete record of consent includes: the name and telephone number of the person who gave it, a copy of the request for consent in the same manner and format in which it was presented, the purpose for which consent was requested and given, a copy of the consent provided, and the date it was given. The same section requires the records it lists to be kept for five years from the date the record is produced. A vendor that cannot produce those parts on request is not merely slow at returns, it is leaving a hole in a file the rules expect you to hold. The certificate many vendors attach to a lead is one common way that evidence travels, and what consent has to say to count is covered on its own page.

Compliance duties a credit does not move

A credit settles the commercial side of a bad lead and moves none of your compliance duties. Three of them stay with whoever places the call, whatever the vendor agrees to do about the money, and each one carries a date. That is why a record which turns out to be months old is a different problem from a merely disappointing one.

The third row is the one that catches buyers of aged records. If your basis for calling a registry-listed number is the consumer's own inquiry rather than written consent, the FTC counts that relationship for 90 days from the inquiry and the FCC for three months from it. Written consent is a separate basis and neither clock runs against it, which is why the age of a record and the paperwork behind it have to be read together rather than one at a time. The database check in the first row is anchored the same way, to the date consent was obtained, so it is the old lead that needs it most. What that database can and cannot tell you is set out separately.

Source: 47 CFR 64.1200, read on 20 September 2026 through the eCFR renderer API at the current issue date for title 47, 14 September 2026. Paragraph (m) makes the reassigned-number safe harbor available only to a caller who queried the Administrator's database, received a response of "no", and, in the rule's words, bears the burden of proof and persuasion. Paragraph (f)(5) sets an established business relationship at three months from an inquiry and eighteen months from a purchase. Both duties fall on the person placing the call. Neither paragraph says anything about a lead vendor. Source: 16 CFR part 310, the FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule, read on 20 September 2026 through the eCFR renderer API at the current issue date for title 16, 17 September 2026. Section 310.5(a) requires the listed records to be kept for a period of 5 years from the date the record is produced, and 310.5(a)(8) enumerates what a complete record of consent contains. Section 310.4(b)(3) sets out six conditions, (i) through (vi), and (iv) requires a registry version obtained no more than thirty-one days before any call is made. Section 310.2(q)(2) sets the inquiry-based relationship at 90 days. Every one of these binds a seller or telemarketer, which in a lead purchase is the buyer placing the calls.

What to settle in writing before the first order

Settle the returns language in writing before any money moves, because every term below is cheap to agree in advance and expensive to argue about after a bad week. Six questions cover most of it, and a vendor who answers all six plainly is telling you something useful whatever the answers turn out to be.

How many bad leads it takes before the source rather than the lead is the problem is a different judgment, made over a run of orders, and it has its own page. So does designing the test that gives you enough leads to judge anything. The terms above are worth fixing first, because they decide what a bad week costs you while you are still finding out.

One last thing, said plainly because the alternative is repeating somebody's marketing. No regulator, trade body or published study sets a standard return window, a standard credit, or a standard share of an order a buyer may send back. We went looking for one before writing this and found none. The closest primary description of how this market works, the FTC staff perspective cited above, says only that the terms are set between the aggregator and the buyer and is silent on remedies. A vendor's own terms page is good evidence of what that vendor offers and no evidence at all of a norm, so read any figure quoted to you as standard as that vendor's figure until somebody produces the study. Ask, get the answer into the order, and you never have to argue about what is customary.