Vivek 2024 Committee Waged ‘Campaign of Harassment’ via Text: Class Action
Republican Vivek Ramaswamy's presidential campaign committee “embarked on an unsolicited campaign of harassment by text call” using the multimedia message service (MMS) standard, causing Phillip Woods and his proposed class members injuries, “including invasion of their privacy, aggravation, annoyance, intrusion…
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on seclusion, trespass, and conversion,” alleged Woods’ Telephone Consumer Protection Act class action Monday (docket 2:23-cv-01958) in U.S. District Court for Arizona in Phoenix. Woods and his class members “have no prior contact, dealings, or relationship” with the committee, Vivek 2024, and never provided it any personal information, including their cellphone numbers, nor did they ever otherwise authorize it to contact them, said the complaint. An Arizona resident, Woods seeks injunctive relief to halt the committee’s “illegal conduct,” plus statutory damages on behalf of himself and his class members, and “any other available legal or equitable remedies” resulting from the committee’s “illegal actions,” it said. Woods alleges the text call he received Aug. 23 via MMS “included an audio/video file that was automatically downloaded to Woods’ phone that used an audible artificial or prerecorded voice to deliver a message,” it said. The MMS text calls occupied electronic memory and storage on Woods’ cellphone and the phones of each of his class members, it said. The MMS text calls also depleted the battery life of those phones and “further interfered with the unencumbered access” by Woods and the class members to their devices.