A statute that prohibits unfair or deceptive acts and practices in trade or commerce, giving both government enforcers and private citizens the right to sue businesses that mislead consumers. Nearly every jurisdiction has one: every US state maintains a version, Canadian provinces such as Quebec have their own, and the United Kingdom passed its Consumer Protection Act in 1987. The one marketers hear about most right now is Washington State’s, codified at chapter 19.86 of the Revised Code of Washington.
How Consumer Protection Acts Work
These laws are the state-level counterparts to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act, which is why lawyers often call them little FTC acts. Rather than listing every forbidden behavior, they establish a broad standard, banning anything unfair or deceptive in commerce, and let courts and regulators apply it case by case. Three features make them powerful:
- Dual enforcement: the state attorney general can sue on behalf of the public, and in most states private citizens can bring their own claims, individually or as class actions.
- Per se violations: other statutes can declare that breaking them automatically violates the CPA. A company that violates the narrow statute inherits the CPA’s remedies on top of the original penalty.
- Fee shifting: prevailing plaintiffs typically recover attorney fees and costs, which makes even small-dollar claims economically viable to litigate.
Washington’s Consumer Protection Act
Washington’s version, enacted in 1961, lets a successful plaintiff recover actual damages, injunctive relief, and attorney fees, and permits courts to treble damages up to a $25,000 cap per violation. What makes it central to email marketing litigation is the per se mechanism: the Commercial Electronic Mail Act (CEMA) declares every violation of its email and text message rules an automatic violation of the Consumer Protection Act. A single misleading subject line therefore generates two claims at once, which is why virtually every CEMA class action filed against retailers also pleads a CPA count.
Not Just a US Concept
The same architecture appears internationally. Quebec’s Consumer Protection Act underpinned the class action authorized in 2025 against Tim Hortons after a contest email mistakenly told roughly 500,000 people they had won a $64,000 boat: the statute prevents companies from nullifying obligations created by their own communications simply by claiming a mistake. Marketers operating across borders should assume that some version of this law applies to every message they send.
Why It Matters to Marketers
Consumer Protection Acts convert marketing copy into legal exposure. Fee shifting means a $100 claim can support a lawsuit, per se hooks mean a niche statute like CEMA imports CPA remedies automatically, and class actions aggregate identical messages into enormous demands. The practical defense is unglamorous: every factual claim in an advertisement, an email subject line, or a promotion, including its deadline, its discount, and its availability, needs to be literally true when it is sent.
