Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) was drafting legislation at press time that would ban the sending of unsolicited advertisements to cell phones.
Numerous Complaints
The first-term New Jersey congressman says he got the idea after his office received numerous unspecified complaints from constituents and congressional staff members who had received the calls.
All of the calls, Holt says, were from Plugout.com, a Fort Lee, NJ-based online distributor of many aftermarket wireless communications accessories.
Holt, who describes Plugout’s unsolicited cell phone calls as a “new form of spam,” a term usually associated with unsolicited e-mail, claims company president Rudy Temiz ignored a written request to immediately end the calls, which Holt characterizes as “an irritating and outrageous invasion of privacy.”
Denies Charges
For his part, Temiz denies that his unsolicited cell phone calls were an invasion of anyone’s privacy.
“If anyone doesn’t like the message we send, they can simply erase it and we won’t take it personally,” he says.
Network
