You’ve seen it before, maybe in your own mailbox. An envelope arrives with a seal that looks vaguely federal. Inside, bold red letters announce “FINAL NOTICE” or “OFFICIAL NOTIFICATION.” The letter references your LLC by name, cites a statute number, and demands payment within ten days to keep your business “in compliance.” It looks like it came from the Secretary of State. It didn’t. It came from a private company that bought a list of newly registered businesses and is billing $150 for a “compliance filing service” nobody asked for, and nobody needs.

Every small business owner in Louisiana has either received one of these or knows someone who has. Until this year, the company sending it was operating in a gray zone — deceptive, arguably fraudulent, but hard to prosecute under Louisiana’s general unfair trade practices statute because the law didn’t specifically define what made a mailer “misleading” in this particular way.

That gray zone just closed. House Bill 853, sponsored by Representative Dixon McMakin, passed the Louisiana Legislature this spring with unanimous votes in both chambers — 93-0 in the House, 34-0 in the Senate — and was signed into law as Act 570. It took effect August 1, 2026, which means it’s already the law of the land in Louisiana today. For AAF Shreveport-Bossier members, this is more than a compliance footnote. It’s a case study in where the line sits between aggressive marketing and deceptive marketing, and it’s worth understanding in detail before it becomes an enforcement headline.

That gray zone just closed.

A Law Born From a National Pattern

Louisiana isn’t inventing a new problem here — it’s catching up to one that regulators across the country have been fighting for years. The Federal Trade Commission and dozens of state attorneys general have issued warnings about “misleading solicitations” tied to LLC annual reports, corporate compliance notices, trademark and copyright renewal notices, and UCC filing statements. The playbook is nearly identical everywhere: buy a public list of business filings, trademark registrations, or property records, then mail something that looks official enough that a busy owner or office manager pays it without reading the fine print.

What makes HB853 notable is its specificity. Rather than relying on Louisiana’s broad Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law (which prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts” generally, without much detail) to catch this behavior after the fact, the legislature wrote a statute that defines, almost checklist-style, exactly what crosses the line. That’s a meaningfully different enforcement posture. Broad, undefined standards require a regulator or plaintiff’s attorney to build a case around intent and consumer harm. A detailed statute lets them point to a specific font size, a specific missing sentence, or a specific phrase and say: this, right here, is the violation.

For advertisers, that specificity is a double-edged sword. It’s good news in the sense that compliance is more knowable — you can check your creative against a list. It’s bad news in the sense that “we didn’t mean to mislead anyone” is a much weaker defense when the law spells out exactly what triggers liability.

What Actually Counts as “Misleading” Now

HB853 amends Louisiana Revised Statute 51:391 to define a misleading solicitation as one that resembles a bill or invoice from a nongovernmental entity, and that does any of the following:

Notice how narrow and specific each trigger is. This isn’t a law against being persuasive, urgent, or even a little pushy in a sales piece. It’s a law against borrowing the credibility of government authority, or hiding the ball on recurring charges, to get a signature or a payment.

The New Disclosure Requirements, Word for Word

If a solicitation could plausibly fall into one of those categories, the law now requires specific, prominent language, in a specific size and, in some cases, a specific color:

These aren’t suggestions buried in an FAQ somewhere. The law is telling advertisers, in effect: if your creative walks anywhere near government-notice territory or recurring billing, you now have a legally mandated warning label, and it has to be big enough and dark enough that nobody can claim they missed it.

Who’s In, Who’s Out

The law applies broadly to nongovernmental entities sending these solicitations, which is a wide net — it’s not limited to any single industry. Louisiana did carve out exemptions for banks and credit unions, insurers licensed to do business in the state, and licensed motor vehicle dealers. Those industries already operate under separate, heavily regulated disclosure regimes, so the legislature apparently decided the overlap wasn’t necessary.

If your business or your client’s business doesn’t fall into one of those three exempt categories, the safe assumption is that HB853 applies to any solicitation that could be read as resembling an invoice, bill, or official notice.

The Penalties Have Teeth

This is where the law moves from “notable” to “urgent” for anyone running campaigns that touch this space. Violations carry a civil fine of up to $1,000 per violation, per solicitation — and note the “per solicitation” language. A mail campaign that goes out to 5,000 recipients isn’t one violation; it’s potentially 5,000.

Because HB853 folds these violations directly into Louisiana’s Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law, there’s a second layer of exposure: private lawsuits. A consumer who was misled can potentially recover three times their actual loss, plus attorney’s fees. That combination — a per-piece civil fine plus treble damages in private litigation — is a serious deterrent, and it’s exactly the kind of structure that tends to attract plaintiff’s attorneys looking for a class of similarly situated consumers.

A 5,000-piece mail run isn’t one violation — it’s potentially 5,000.

Why AAF Members Should Care, Even If You’d Never Run a “Scam” Mailer

It’s tempting to read all of this and think, “that’s a problem for scammers, not for legitimate advertisers.” But the law’s language is broader than the bad actors it was clearly written to target, and that’s exactly why it deserves a second look from anyone doing legitimate work in this space.

Consider a few scenarios that aren’t scams at all, but could still land inside the statute’s reach if creative teams aren’t careful:

None of these examples require bad intent. They just require using the visual and verbal conventions this industry has used for years, in a jurisdiction that just made some of those conventions illegal without specific disclosures.

A Discussion Worth Having: Where’s the Line Between Persuasive and Deceptive?

This law raises a question that’s bigger than Louisiana and bigger than this one statute: at what point does “creating urgency” or “using authoritative design language” cross over from good advertising into deceptive advertising? The advertising industry has always operated in that tension. Urgency sells. Authority sells. Familiar, official-looking formats build trust and get envelopes opened.

HB853 is essentially the legislature answering that question for one narrow category of solicitation — but the underlying tension isn’t going away, and it isn’t unique to Louisiana. We’d genuinely like to hear from AAF Shreveport-Bossier members on this one. Has your agency had internal debates about how far is too far when it comes to urgency language or official-looking design? Have you had a client push for something that made your team uncomfortable from a “is this misleading” standpoint, even before this law existed? Drop a comment or reach out — this is exactly the kind of conversation our chapter exists to have, and member experiences shape how we think about advocacy on future legislation like this.

A Practical Checklist Now That the Law Is in Effect

HB853 has been in force since August 1, and any noncompliant solicitation going out the door today is exposed to the penalties above. Here’s a starting point for auditing your own materials or your clients’:

Our Take

AAF Shreveport-Bossier supports the underlying goal of this legislation. Consumers deserve to know when they’re looking at a sales offer rather than an official government communication, and honest advertisers benefit when bad actors who trade on false authority get pushed out of the market. A cleaner playing field is good for the profession’s credibility as a whole.

At the same time, we’d encourage every member to read this law as an invitation to review creative standards generally — not just for the obvious cases, but for anything in the gray zone between “urgent and persuasive” and “urgent and misleading.” Louisiana just drew one bright line. It probably won’t be the last.

This post is intended as a general summary of new legislation for educational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. Members with campaigns touching Louisiana consumers, particularly anything involving business compliance notices, renewal offers, or subscription billing, should consult with legal counsel to evaluate specific creative against the statute’s requirements as soon as possible, since the law is already in effect.

Source: Louisiana State Legislature, HB853 / Act 570 (2026 Regular Session) · View document