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Reydson Schuenck Barros
Reydson Schuenck Barros
·Posted in Ask community

Contact is banned

Hello,

When I send messages via the SendPulse WhatsApp API, I have been receiving a Bad Request error with the following message: "Contact: Contact is banned". Has anyone else experienced this? Could you please explain what it means?

Thank you!

Best reply by Viktoria Otroshenko

Hey Reydson,
Sorry you are facing this issue!
This message means that the WhatsApp contact you’re trying to message is blocked from receiving messages.

In practice, “Contact is banned” usually indicates one of the following situations:

  • The user has blocked your WhatsApp number.

  • The user reported your messages as spam.

  • WhatsApp (Meta) restricted messaging to this contact due to policy or compliance reasons.

  • The contact opted out or was automatically blocked by WhatsApp’s anti-spam systems.

This is a WhatsApp-side restriction, not an error in SendPulse or your API request. When a contact is banned, SendPulse can’t deliver messages to that user, and the API returns this error to prevent further attempts.

If this happens for many contacts, it’s worth reviewing:

  • message content and frequency,

  • opt-in flow,

  • and overall number reputation.

For a single contact, there’s unfortunately no way to unblock it — messages to that user won’t be delivered going forward.

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