Fergie's Tech Blog

Sign of Trouble for SMS Spammers

Howard Wolinsky writes in The Chicago Sun-Times:

A year ago, a Washington, D.C., marketer tried to sell Lei Shen a daily horoscope service in an unsolicited text message that popped up on her cell phone. On Wednesday, Shen shot a message back to text spammers in a federal court here, telling marketers to back off and pony up.

Shen, an information technology attorney at Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw in Chicago, said the calls cost only 5 cents each, but it was the principle of the thing. "I subscribed to the cellular service. I wondered how they got my phone number. It didn't seem fair. I was being charged for each message," she said.

Now Shen and about 1,000 other cellular customers are expected to collect $150 each from Distributive Networks Inc., a Washington, D.C., marketing company that sells Astromobo horoscopes, Daily Pop Gossip, Mad Love Tips and Rinstar Mobile services for cell phones. Distributive, which could not be reached for comment, agreed to pay a maximum of $150,000 in the settlement, but did not admit guilt.

posted by Fergie @ 2/01/2007 03:25:00 PM