The Dallas Cowboys football team will pay $1.73 million to settle charges that a telemarketing firm hired by the team sent unsolicited commercial advertisements by fax to businesses and consumers in violation of federal law.
American Blast Fax broadcast unsolicited faxes on two occasions to 125,000 locations in the Dallas area in December 1999, said Julius Glickman, a Houston lawyer representing the plaintiff, Omnibus International, Dallas, in the class-action lawsuit. The faxes marketed tickets to Cowboys playoff games.
Because the lawsuit is a class action, people and businesses that believe they received an unsolicited commercial fax as part of the campaign may claim up to $1,000, or $500 for each of the two faxes, Glickman said.
A spokesman for the Cowboys declined to comment.
Glickman said he had no information about American Blast Fax. A number listed for American Blast Fax in Addison, TX, was not in service.
The company has been sued on at least two other occasions by the attorneys general of Texas and Missouri. It also received citations on multiple occasions from the FCC.
In July, The New York Times reported that Robert M. Horne, owner of American Blast Fax, had said in testimony during an Arizona junk fax case that he was shutting down the company. Horne further testified that his company had faced at least 50 lawsuits.
“If you were facing in excess of $1 billion against you and your company, you would be rethinking what you were going to do for a living, too,” the Times quoted Horne as saying.
