A couple of months ago, Rodney Joffe won an appellate court decision against a company using SMS text messaging to send spam to his cell phone.
Now, Verizon has sued an alleged cell phone spammer.
Verizon’s lawsuit against Passport says about one-quarter of the alleged spam messages were sent to sequential sets of phone numbers within an area code — 609-000-0001, then 609-000-0002, etc. The text messages were sent fast; up to 200 messages per minutes, Verizon says. And the winter-wary Northeast was apparently targeted for the tropical cruise ads: about one in 7 were sent to New Jersey area codes.1
That’s kind of odd given that apparently all of those numbers from 609-000-0001 through 609-999-9999 had opted in, at least according to Passport:
“Every number we contact has opted in on the Internet (most of the time) or has entered their information into a sweepstakes or drawing,” the e-mail said. “Most do not remember the license agreement associated with their entry.” The e-mail was signed “Passport Holidays Legal Department”2
Yeah. Right.
Footnotes
- Verizon sues alleged cell phone spammer, NBC News (2005), https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10166148 (last visited Nov 22, 2005). ↩︎
- Id. ↩︎
About the Author
Mickey Chandler is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.
