Last month, the Star-Ledger (New Jersey’s largest newspaper) published a story on its front page called “Cellular companies hunt nameless nuisances.”  The article focused on how wireless consumers are becoming increasingly annoyed with text message spam and telemarketing calls sent to their wireless phones.  Verizon Wireless tries to stay ahead of the bad guys by using all our resources – network, legal, human and others – to help stop what is not only a nuisance, but an invasion of privacy, for our customers.  It is, after all, illegal to use an autodialer to call a cell phone, whether you’re delivering a voice or a text message.  Using sophisticated spam filters on our network, Verizon Wireless blocks hundreds of millions of spam messages each month from ever reaching our customers’ handsets.  And, when those messages do reach our customers, our team investigates and, when warranted, files lawsuits to make them stop – and in some cases put these companies out of business.   We also give our customers several options to prevent or block spam ranging from creating an alias to blocking all text messages.   There’s more information on how to do that in this news release