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I won a suit against a party that sent me an unsolicited text message

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Re: I won a suit against a party that sent me an unsolicited text message

#41

Post by 300bps »

dweekly wrote: post #39
thathndude wrote: post #31

Lawyer here. I do this kind of work for a client. Good for this guy for taking the fight to the spammers. As we head into election season, a lot of us are going to get unsolicited text messages like this. You too can sue for them! Some of what was said in the tweets regarding your rights and what you have to do to file a claim are, in my experience and opinion, not correct. The general idea is right, but some of the…

OP here. I'm definitely not a lawyer, so apologies for incorrect statements made in the thread. I'd love to learn more about correct framing / case history / rights here to avoid sharing misinformation. If you'd rather provide the feedback privately / off-the-record, my email is david at weekly dot org. Thank you!

The only thing that I noticed was not 100% correct is:

5. [..] courts will seize from them what you are owed

The process to get a court to do this is extremely difficult. It often starts with Debtor Examination followed by filing a bunch of documents to start the seizing process. If the person really doesn’t want to pay the judgement though, good luck. For example, during the Debtor Examination they have to answer truthfully under oath where their bank accounts and other property are. And then as soon as the meeting is over they can move to a different bank.

Getting a judgement is the easy part. Collecting it is the hard part.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-is-debtor-exami...

Re: I won a suit against a party that sent me an unsolicited text message

#42

Post by 300bps »

hash872 wrote: post #6

I would love to do this, but the few times that I've tried to look up the company, there's no real evidence as to who it is. And I'm fairly sophisticated at that kind of research, I know most of the tricks- however, these companies do successfully hide their identity. I did, one time, find the likely CEO of one of these companies, and I called his cell phone late on a Friday night to mess with him. However, I didn't…

This part is actually pretty simple.

You simply keep responding that you’re interested. Click their link. Fill out their form. Eventually you’ll get to a real person at a real company that was benefiting from the illegal spam.

Re: I won a suit against a party that sent me an unsolicited text message

#44

Post by hannasanarion »

MarkMarine wrote: post #24
throw8383833jj wrote: post #17

I think a much easier way would be if we just taxed phone calls at 1 cent each. I mean absolutely everything else is already taxed: you pay taxes just to stay alive. the least that could be done is add a 1 cent tax to each phone call, just enough to stop the mass phone calling.

These calls are already illegal. There is a Do not call list. The gov has just been completely inept at enforcement, I don’t think we need extra tax, just enforce the laws we have.

The point is that, if there is a per-call cost that everybody has to pay, it becomes much harder for spammers to justify automatically calling hundreds of thousands of numbers per day, while regular people who make one or two calls a day won't notice.

"enforcing the laws we have" isn't enough because spoofing exists and many of the spammers operate across borders.

Re: I won a suit against a party that sent me an unsolicited text message

#46

Post by galdosdi »

aliqot wrote: post #32
flerchin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, and folks could even have a credit of 500 phone calls a month, or whatever a reasonable number would be, so no cost to consumers at all. Instead of a tax, it should be a minimum charge that goes to the carriers. So that they would be incentivized to collect it.

In a world where we pay for stamps, why didn't bulk unsolicited mail go away? This won't work.

It's a fair fee though. It pays for my attention as a recipient. It prevents an externality. It's no different than having to deposit a quarter to take a shopping cart, to incentivize you to return it. A tenth of a cent would probably be just as effective btw; the problem is that you can send a million text messages, wasting a million seconds of other people's time assuming they spend an average of 1 second looking at it, all for far less than the value of all that time wasted.

Nobody is talking about TSA, what a non sequitur.

Re: I won a suit against a party that sent me an unsolicited text message

#47

Post by game-of-throws »

aliqot wrote: post #32
flerchin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, and folks could even have a credit of 500 phone calls a month, or whatever a reasonable number would be, so no cost to consumers at all. Instead of a tax, it should be a minimum charge that goes to the carriers. So that they would be incentivized to collect it.

In a world where we pay for stamps, why didn't bulk unsolicited mail go away? This won't work.

Why wouldn't this solve the problem? Phone calls have a real cost, however small it may be, to both the recipient and the carriers. Everyone accepts paying for stamps. What makes paying for calls different, and such an abhorrent idea that we shouldn't even discuss it?

EDIT: Parent comment was replaced with something completely different so my reply makes no longer makes sense, but I'm leaving it unchanged.

Re: I won a suit against a party that sent me an unsolicited text message

#48

Post by dweekly »

300bps wrote: post #41
dweekly wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here. I'm definitely not a lawyer, so apologies for incorrect statements made in the thread. I'd love to learn more about correct framing / case history / rights here to avoid sharing misinformation. If you'd rather provide the feedback privately / off-the-record, my email is david at weekly dot org. Thank you!

The only thing that I noticed was not 100% correct is: 5. [..] courts will seize from them what you are owed The process to get a court to do this is extremely difficult. It often starts with Debtor Examination followed by filing a bunch of documents to start the seizing process. If the person really doesn’t want to pay the judgement though, good luck. For example, during the Debtor Examination they have to answer tr…

Ah! Yes, my statement was incorrect. I had observed wage garnishment on the other side of the fence as an employer and had assumed courts would do this processing after a default judgement. This turned out to be a wrong assumption.

Re: I won a suit against a party that sent me an unsolicited text message

#49

Post by game-of-throws »

thathndude wrote: post #31

Lawyer here. I do this kind of work for a client. Good for this guy for taking the fight to the spammers. As we head into election season, a lot of us are going to get unsolicited text messages like this. You too can sue for them! Some of what was said in the tweets regarding your rights and what you have to do to file a claim are, in my experience and opinion, not correct. The general idea is right, but some of the…

> As we head into election season, a lot of us are going to get unsolicited text messages like this. You too can sue for them!

Can you elaborate? Every source I've seen says that politicians have exempted themselves from the spam laws. e.g. a random google result: https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/elections/202...

> That's because the National Do Not Call Registry does not apply to political text messages.

If you know a way around this, please spill the beans!

Re: I won a suit against a party that sent me an unsolicited text message

#50

Post by everforward »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #36

To what extent can this be automated? There are apps to fight parking/speeding tickets... could the same be done for little lawsuits to sue spammers? Maybe a lawyer could comment on feasibility of this.

From a technical perspective, I think it would be hard to correctly identify who to sue. Phone numbers can be spoofed, gotten through a 3rd party like Twilio, or come from email to SMS gateways (if those still exist).

For texts, you can probably parse out a link they want you to click, but I would expect them to be using a WHOIS guard.

Phone calls are even worse, because you'd have to interact with the rep enough to get info on who's making the call.

If it starts filing bogus lawsuits, whoever's running it may end up paying a whole bunch of attorney's fees to people defending themselves, get banned from filing lawsuits, and be more annoying to the general populace than the spammers are. I'd rather get a bunch of spam calls than deal with a single unfounded lawsuit.

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