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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

#81

Post by cwkoss »

game-of-throws wrote: post #49
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 message…

I would LOVE to be able to sue political spammers. I donated to many candidates in 2016 and have been getting crazy amounts of text spam from pols ive never heard of for the past 5 years.

Politicians shouldn't have zero consequences for selling my personal data.

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

#82

Post by elliekelly »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #37

In Germany, any company telling you that you won something is required to provide that prize. Unfortunately, the scams I get tend to be from abroad, and/or the actors behind them impossible to identify (and they also often use vague language like "potentially won" or "won one of our prizes" vs. "YOU WON A BRAND NEW TESLA CYBERTRUCK").

Who is ultimately responsible for providing the prize? Let’s say a German marketing employee is fed up with their job and wants to go out in a blaze of glory à la JetBlue slide guy so they text a bunch of people “YOU WON A BRAND NEW TESLA CYBERTRUCK”. Would the employer or the employee be on the hook to supply the Cybertrucks?

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

#83

Post by cwkoss »

galdosdi wrote: post #46
aliqot wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

If only we could get paid by ad companies for trying to steal our attention.

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

#85

Post by thfuran »

MarkMarine wrote: post #68
vpribish wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

clearly the current model doesn't work well enough. US laws don't stop Nigerian scammers abusing weak telecom systems. Adding a tax paid by the carrier incentivises them to collect it from the upstream chain all the way back to the caller.

Us laws COULD stop these scammers, but the govt has been too scared to actually lock out the carriers that are carrying these spam calls or selling these big blocks of local numbers. It seems like they are starting to play hardball, but we’ll see: “ The Cox/Jones/Sumco Panama operation appears to be responsible for making more than eight billion unlawful prerecorded message calls to American consumers since at least…

How many years and millions of dollars does it take for an enforcement action like this? I think a per-call fee that can be cheaply assessed by carriers on callers that renders such spamming unprofitable in the first place is likely to be a far more efficient approach.

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

#86

Post by Wowfunhappy »

300bps wrote: post #42
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.

Could this make the lawsuit more difficult since you've signaled consent? (Yes, they made the first move prior to your consent, but I wonder if that would be a murkier narrative in the courtroom.)

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

#87

Post by filoeleven »

paulgb wrote: post #25
sethjr5rtfgh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know that or are you guessing? Because my guess is it won't be that simple.

Yeah, my guess is they would say “oh, we can just do an ACH debit and save you the trouble. What's your account number?”

Spitballing here:

You can place ACH blocks on accounts, at some banks anyway. I don’t know if the bank will give you the transaction information if a transfer is attempted. If they will, shouldn’t it be possible to set up a honeypot account in order to get the ACH info? Is that info enough to trace back to the spammers?

This opens up other legal questions though. It’s entirely possible that you could then be on the hook for non payment or something.

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

#88

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#89

Post by whatshisface »

game-of-throws wrote: post #47
aliqot wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If paying for stamps can't stop junk mail, I don't see how paying for calls could stop cold callers.

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

#90

Post by whatshisface »

game-of-throws wrote: post #70
aliqot wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a world where we pay for stamps, why didn't bulk unsolicited mail go away? Why would it work for telephones?

> In a world where we pay for stamps, why didn't bulk unsolicited mail go away? Why would it work for telephones? Different situation. Bulk mail is not illegal, in fact the USPS subsidizes it. Spam calls ARE illegal. Hopefully phone carriers will not give discounts for explicitly illegal uses of their networks, but we can deal with that later if it happens.

You are right back at the same "distinguishing legal from illegal calls" problem.
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