It's been a bad couple of weeks for spammers in courts around the U.S.On September 20, an Arizona appeals court upheld a lower court decision which found that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 does indeed apply to Short Message Service (SMS) spam sent to mobile phones.The case, Joffe v. Acacia Mortgage Corp., is another victory for Rodney Joffe, my friend and a fellow co-conspirator in Whitehat.com.According to the AP:
Acacia argued that it had only sent a message and did not "call" Joffe, but the Court of Appeals said that was an incomplete description of what the company did when it used e-mail to indirectly connect to Joffe's cell phone and place a text message."Even though Acacia used an attenuated method to dial a cell phone telephone number, it nevertheless did so," Judge Patricia K. Norris wrote for the panel.
Then, on September 22, we learned in late word from Oklahoma that one of today's most prolific spammers, Robert Soloway, was ordered by a federal judge to pay more than $10 Million in statutory damages and has been permanently ordered to stop his spamming ways. Failure to heed the judge's order can result in arrest, extradition to Oklahoma, and jail for contempt of court.Careful readers of PrivacyClue will remember that Robert Soloway recently got on my bad side by sending out the text of a column I wrote, making it appear as if I had sent the spam. As a result of the court's injunction, if Soloway sends any more spam in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act, he's looking at jail time.I'm sure his Mom is so proud!