Nowadays Verizon seems to be in news all because of the innumerable lawsuits it has filed rather than any major developments it has undertaken in the field of technology of late. The other day I was talking about the Verizon - Vonage catfight which still continues but in an another case it has won a battle against Specialized Programming

and Marketing LLC which spammed Verizon's customers with various holiday offers.

The lawsuit was filed in October 2005 against Passport Holiday and the complaint was further amended in February 2006 after Passport Holiday was slapped with a fine of $10,000. In the amendment Specialized Programming and Marketing was named as the company responsible for sending spam. The company will have to pay Verizon $200,000 and has been banned from contacting its customers.

Steve Zipperstein, Wireless vice president of legal and external affairs, Verizon stated:

Text messaging is a great and increasingly popular way to communicate, but unwanted or unsolicited text message spam to our customers' handsets is unacceptable. The fault of the company stated above was that it made the mistake of sending SMS which encouraged subscribers of Verizon to call them for claiming a Bahamas cruise which they had supposedly won and as a result Verizon slapped it with a lawsuit which stated that it had violated the Federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

This is not the end of lawsuits filed by Verizon as last year too it had brought lawsuits against Florida telemarketers for spamming. It seems Verizon is minting money either way.