A controversial Virginia marketing and polling firm appears to have used a legal loophole to bombard scores of Americans with unsolicited text messages berating President Barack Obama policy on same-sex marriage, less than a week before election day.
More than a dozen different messages landed on the screens of phone users late on Tuesday, originating from mysterious websites instead of phone numbers. They attacked Mr Obama and Democrats on a variety of issues such as abortion, foreign policy, same-sex marriage and taxation.
The domain names of those websites had been registered with GoDaddy.com through a firm that masks original owners.
On Wednesday, Reuters compiled a list of at least nine websites gathered from reporters who received the political text messages. A review of websites that track domain name registrations revealed that three of the nine websites that sent the messages were registered by Jason Flanary, who was unavailable for comment.
Those sites had been suspended for spam and abuse.
It remains unclear who may have paid for the latest wave of messages and how many people received them.
“Obama supports same-sex relationships. Voting for him will destroy the sanctity of marriage.” read one of the messages, which were sent out on Tuesday.
