The Score Sued for Text Spamming

I wasn't a regular listener of the Score until they got the Cubs, and I've never texted them, so I never got these spam texts. If I did, I probably wouldn't have sued. But someone did. From today's Tom Taylor column...

CBS is sued over unwanted texts from Chicago’s WSCR/670. The all-sports Score just had its best age 6+ PPM share ever, powered by the Cubs. But in a federal court in Wisconsin, attorneys filed a potentially costly class action suit on behalf of Elaine Bonin, alleging that the Score sent numerous unsolicited texts to her TracFone. She says she never shared her cellphone number with CBS, but somehow got texts from 67011 – the Score’s texting address. Those SMS text messages about Super Bowl scores and NBA Bulls games ate into her TracFone allotment of monthly time, she says. Since the suit alleges they were sent to Bonin’s phone using an “automatic telephone dialing system for non-emergency purposes,” it believes CBS violated the TCPA. The federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act is what iHeart ran into last year in a suit filed in Cook County, Illinois court – and which led iHeart to settle for $8.5 million (June 6 NOW Newsletter). In that case, the court granted class status and gave targets of unwanted texts by stations like Washington DC’s “Hot 99.5” WIHT until September 8 to file a “valid claim form.” That’s probably where Wisconsin’s Ademi & O’Reilly law firm wants to go – yielding fees for the firm, and discouraging other companies from supposed text-spamming.