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Verizon Wins Injunction Against Text Spammer
bulled writes "CNet is running a story illustrating the US court system's ongoing harsh opinion about unwarranted communications of any kind. Verizon Wireless recently won a lawsuit against a company that was delivering massive numbers of spam text messages to its customers. Specialized Programming and Marketing and Henderson was ordered to pay more than $200,000 in damages to Verizon Wireless, some two years after Verizon filed the suit against the company. In 2005 Specialized Programming sent some 100,000 emails to Verizon phones. Verizon now has an injunction against the Marketing firm, another win for a company that has developed a reputation for going after spammers."
Good job taking care of inbound spam, but whan will they do something about spam emanating from their networks?
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https://nssg.trendmicro.com/nrs/reports/rank.php?
See #5.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Clicking on a link and getting an unnecessary advertisement for Best Buy before being able to read the story.
Also watching the number of FIOS broadband IP blocks that I have to ban skyrocket due to open proxies and SMTP spammers loving the large pipes.
Exactly.
Where is the logic here - the company was ordered to pay $200'000 to Verizon, which already charged their customers $XXX for these text messages. So under the guise of "protecting their customers" they just made another wad of cash. I'll eat my shorts if they credit their customers for this.
About one in 10 SMS messages I get are from Sprint (I'm a Sprint customer) advertising a service, ringtone or some other downloadable. So excuse me while I don't feel Verizon's pain.
I hate the spam I get from Cingular. I've called several times about it, replied back with "STOP" like they tell me to, all to no avail.
Cingular even refuses to turn my text messaging off (I never use it, I hate text messages).
A month after signing up, ALL for-profit telemarketing calls have stopped. The only ones that remain are the not-for-profit-beg-for-money-so-80%-can-go-to-the- telemarketing-company variety. While annoying, it's a lot less than it used to be.
If they're calling your cell phone, that's against the law.
If incoming text messages were free in the US, then Verizon would have lost this lawsuit.
Every time one of this spammer's messages hit my phone I was charged $0.10, and verizon is pursuing damages?... seems like Verizon is double dipping a bit.
I wonder if they aren't "evil"!
They could allow a spammer to operate for a significant period of time, increasing revenue from those of us who don't have text messaging on our accounts. Then they shut him down, and get royalties. Finally they look good in everyones eyes, when in reality they made a decent chunk of change for no real work.
You can't tell me it's that difficult to determine where the messages came from... they probably could have shut him down sooner, but it wasn't worth the effort yet... mostly because they were not getting overwhelmed with calls to have text messaging charges dropped.
Hmm... I so hate to be one of those conspiracy theorists.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Interesting, thanks. We registered our home number when the do-not-call registry first went on line and I don't remember if they had an option for mobile numbers then. As to your second link, I think I knew this was illegal but what's your recourse when the offending number is blocked? Last time I tried calling Verizon, I was on hold for a very long time. Perhaps I'll try the website. Thanks again.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?