WASHINGTON – A controversial Virginia marketing and polling firm appears to have used a legal loophole to bombard scores of Americans with unsolicited text messages berating President Barack Obama, less than a week before election day.
More than a dozen different messages landed on the screens of phone users late on Tuesday, originating from mysterious websites instead of phone numbers. They attacked Mr Obama and Democrats on a variety of issues such as abortion, foreign policy, same-sex marriage and taxation.
The domain names of those websites had been registered with GoDaddy.comthrough a firm that masks original owners.
On Wednesday, Reuters compiled a list of at least nine websites gathered from reporters who received the political text messages. A review of websites that track domain name registrations revealed that three of the nine websites that sent the messages were registered by Jason Flanary.
Those sites had been suspended for spam and abuse.
An email for Flanary indicated he works for ccAdvertising, a division of FreeEats.co. Neither Flanary nor the firm returned requests for comment.
CcAdvertising’s website says: “All ccAdvertising services are compliant with all Do Not Call regulations and exceptions.”
Based in Centreville, Virginia, ccAdvertising is a firm that has represented Republican candidates. It has been fined, sued and pursued for aggressive political pushes. State authorities and private parties have argued that it violate laws against robo-calls and other types of automated phone contact.
It remains unclear who may have paid for the latest wave of messages and how many people received them.
“If re-elected, Obama will use taxpayer money to fund abortion. Don’t let this happen,” read one of the messages, which were sent out on Tuesday. “Medicare goes bankrupt in 4,000 days while Obama plays politics with senior health,” read another.
In 2011, Flanary unsuccessfully ran as a Republican for the state senate in Virginia, while his company was sued in Fairfax County for allegedly unleashing thousands of spam texts in the last days of campaigning.
Federal law generally prohibits sending text messages to phone users who did not give consent, but it does not specifically address non-commercial messages that originate as email, which includes political ones.
That is how ccAdvertising appears to get around the law – each phone number by default has an attached email address. The spammer can spray emails to those addresses through trial and error. That way the message goes through as an email but appears to the receiver as a text message. They can cost consumers money if they do not have unlimited data plans. – (Reuters)