Centergate Research Group chairman Rodney Joffe plans to file a lawsuit in small claims court next week against a mortgage company that delivered an unsolicited advertisement to his cell phone.
Joffe, outraged by the advertisement that reached him during a recent performance of “Riverdance” in Phoenix, has vowed to campaign against cell phone spam, he said last night.
“This is outrageous,” he said. “The guy is totally unrepentant.”
Officials at the company, Arcacia National Mortgage Co., Phoenix, AZ, said in a Wall Street Journal report Wednesday that “there is nothing improper or illegal about their marketing efforts.” After receiving the message in January, Joffe contacted the company which claimed it would stop but he received a similar message two months later, he said.
Joffe said that the burden of cost to send and receive text messages to cell phone falls on the cell phone owner. “With some cell phone calling packages you may have a number of message units free, after which you begin paying,” he said. “But if each company in the country sent you just one message a year, that’s 3,500 messages a day. You’d have to stop using your cell phone.”
Over the last three months, Arcacia National Mortgage Co. delivered the unsolicited messages to at least 90,000 cell phone users using a simple technique to reach the easily identifiable short-message service, or SMS, phones, the report said. To send the messages, advertisers combine the name of the service provider and the user’s cell phone number to transmit thousands of messages quickly. And because cell phone numbers are assigned in blocks of 9,999, thousands of messages can be transmitted quickly, the report said.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that the legal status of unsolicited advertisements to cell phones is unclear and that cell phone companies claim they are have no recourse to prevent the spamming.
Joffe, also chairman of Whitehat, Tempe, AZ, and a number of other technology companies, said he is filing the small claims suit, under provisions in the 1991 federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, in a first step towards a possible class-action suit.
Some legislators, hearing complaints from constituents, are also getting in on the action.
Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) introduced legislation earlier this year making it illegal to send unsolicited text messages to cell phones without permission. The bill is in committee.
