Firm Pays 6.5 Million for Fax Spamming

Geopoliticus writes "This article over at the Chicago Tribune tells of a car dealership in St. Louis that will pay up to 6.5 million to people it sent junk faxes to. Now, if we could just get this kind of settlement for all the crap in my inbox I could stay unemployed forever." If I got a quarter for each piece of junkmail in my inbox, it would cover having a pizza delivered to my house every day, and still have enough left over to get a few comics to read each day while I ate!

Comments

Well then ...

[Magus311X]

If I got a quarter for each piece of junkmail in my inbox, it would cover having a pizza delivered to my house every day, and still have enough left over to get a few comics to read each day while I ate!

Still to figure out sendmail.cf, Rob?

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Fax prank

[SpelledBackwards]

Not quite fax spamming, but my brother read about a great way to get back at someone through their fax machine, especially if they have one of those machines with rolled paper, not individual sheets. Wait until night when the fax machine is unattended. Take about 4 sheets of paper (with lots of black on it if you're feeling particularly evil) and tape them together seamlessly. Insert it into your fax machine, and begin sending. As the first sheet comes through, tape it to the last sheet (which hasn't been fed in yet,) creating an endless loop that keeps cycling through like a multiple page fax. When the person comes to their fax machine the next morning, his toner and paper will have been all used up.

Re:Fax prank

[NanoGator]

If you wanted to be really bad, place your cat on a scanner and grab an image of it. Then, print that image so that it's life size on a laser printer. (color might be detectable..) Then, fax that through. If it works, you might be able to convince somebody you tried to fax your cat to them. ;)

(yes, I was inspired by Gary Larson.)

Re:Fax prank

[chrisos]

About 10 years ago, my then boss was at a client site in Oz, when he ran into some config troubles with the software he was setting up.

He called me in the UK, and asked me to photocopy the whole manual (he needed about 4 pages! (yes, my boss was an arse)) and fax it to the hotel he was staying at.

Unfortunately, the manual was A6 and the paper was A4, so even copying two pages at a time, only half the page had text on it.

As I'm lazy (to say the least) I couldn't be bothered to close the photocopier between each photocopy (I'm a software engineer, not a photcopy boy). The end result was that half of the paper was pitch black, the other half had two small pages of text, with a lovely thick black border.

So with my 100 or so pages of paper, I set off to the fax machine, dialed the number for the hotel in Oz and started feeding in the pages one by one (back in the days before page feeders :)).

About 3/4 of the way through, the line was dropped and I couldn't get another connection. So I tried calling the reception desk at the hotel and there was no answer. I got bored trying and went home for the night.

The next day, I called the hotel and got my boss on the phone to see if he needed the rest of the manual.

Apparently, the reason for the line being dropped, was that the fax machine in Oz had burst into flames (remmember all those black borders & boxes?) due to it being a thermal printer and doing lots of black bits.

And the reason that I couldn't get through to the night porter on the reception desk at the hotel?

Well that would have been because the entire hotel was evacuated at 5AM.

Oh how I laughed.

I felt that it was poetic justice at all the photocopying and faxing done, when only 4 pages where required.

Apologies to any others staing at the hotel at the time :)

Re:Fax spam laws should be extended to email

[TheBahxMan]

yes, you anal.

Being Slashdot...

[MongooseCN]

I figured someone would have gotten and estimate on the cost of pizza and comics in CmdrTaco's area and calculate the number of spams he recieves every day.


(Pizza + comics * 2) / 0.25 = # of spams.

Re:Here's the text of the article....

[Nonesuch]

A notice of the settlement was sent -- by fax -- to the 33,000 numbers turned over by the company that did the faxing for the dealership. That company, American Blast Fax of Dallas, is out of business, he said.

Anybody else see the irony in this?