BEIJING, Jan. 13 (Xinhua) -- A Bejing man who received 3,000 unsolicited text messages after his phone number was used in a TV drama series has sued the producers and won.

A Beijing court has ordered the Runshi Rongguang Film Production Company Ltd. to pay Chen Bing 2,000 yuan (about 256 U.S. dollars) in compensation saying the producers should have dialed the number to make sure it wasn't in use.

The company, which says it didn't mean to cause anyone trouble, came up with the phone number by using a staff member's birthday.

Chen, 39, says he started receiving an endless stream of text messages in July 2004.

"It is so annoying and for a long time I wondered why I was getting all these text messages," said Chen who says his business was affected by the constant interruptions.

Chen finally figured out that the culprit was a TV series called Chinese Police-September Storm. In episode 22 Chen's phone number was used in the villain's dialogue who spoke it slowly allowing another character to write down. The number also appeared in the captioning of the text.

The series aired from 2004 to 2006 and sold on DVD.