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

www.junkfax.org

[Lancer]

See junkfax.org if you want in-depth info on how to get junk faxers to pay you as well :)

Registration required

[Ali Jenab]

So use this login to read the story:

user: 578929835
pass: 578929835

Christ, Taco.

[Mike Schiraldi]

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!

Taco bitches about all his spam every time he posts a story.. "Ooh, i'm an internet old-timer, i'm tough enough to handle thousands of pieces of spam in my inbox every day."

Install SpamAssassin. I did, a few months ago, and all my spam is dropped in a special folder. False negatives are very rare, and i've never gotten a false positive.

Re:Christ, Taco.

[toby360]

SpamAssasin can be found Here in case anyone would like to look into it :)

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

[bedessen]

For those that wish not to fill in a number of required (!!) fields such as postal address, birth year, last name, etc., here is the text of the article -- all 15 or so lines of it.

Firm to Pay Up to $6.5M for Junk Fax
By Associated Press

July 10, 2002, 8:57 AM CDT

ST. LOUIS -- A car dealership agreed to pay up to $6.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its unsolicited "junk fax" advertisements, which are barred by federal law, a lawyer said.

Promotions for Newbold Toyota-BMW of O'Fallon, Ill., were faxed to more than 33,000 businesses and homes in the 314 and 636 area codes around St. Louis in early 2001.

The dealership's owners did not know the practice was illegal when they hired a company to do the advertising, said lawyer Steven Katz, who filed the case last year.

If a judge approves the settlement after a September hearing, anyone who received a fax can claim as much as $500 for each advertisement received, the standard penalty under the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Katz said he did not expect everyone to file a claim.

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.

Copyright © 2002, The Associated Press

Re:Fax vs. Email spamming

[bonius_rex]

Baloney.
If you backup your mail servers (you do backup your servers, right?) and take the tapes offsite for disaster recovery, having tapes full of bullshit costs real money. I need more tapes, bigger hard drives etc, etc for my mail servers.

SPAM is a serious problem.
I don't think a legislative solution will do any good, becuase the spammers will just move to Sealand or something.

I think the real problem is that it's too easy to forge email. This is just a pulled-out-of-my-ass solution, but could SMTP be changed such that it requires digital signatures on each message, from each server it passes though. That way, I can verify against a trusted certificate authority, and know where this message originated and how it got to my server.
Then, I know who to blacklist.

Or am I just talking arse?

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[Kallahar]

get spamassassin, catches 99% of the spam, and I've never had a false positive.

Travis

Prevent SPAM with TMDA

[infiniti99]

I highly recommend using TMDA on your mail server to defeat SPAM. It works by maintaining a whitelist of valid senders. If someone emails you and they are not in the whitelist, then they receive a confirmation request email. They must reply to it in order to be added to the whitelist (at which point, TMDA will deliver their original message, and allow all new ones to pass through). No having to report SPAMs, no worry of maintaining a never ending blacklist. TMDA does it all for you, putting a minor inconvenience on first-time senders.

The end result is that I get no SPAM. Zero, zlich, nada, not one -- with no effort on my part.

I believe there are other packages out there similar to TMDA that you may want to try. Regardless, I'm convinced that a whitelist-centric strategy is the way to beat SPAM.

SpamAssassin

[zarqman]

spamassassin is great. it does sort out out a lot of mail. but, it is possible to get a false positive out of it. it took me a few days to get some of the newsletters i receive on to the whitelist properly. and i have had a couple false positives on inbound personal emails. and that's after i set my threshold higher than the default. it does eliminate 90%+ of it though. in my case i've set it up with a dual threshold of sorts. the junk with a ton of points goes straight to /dev/null and what's in the middle goes to a special folder. still, i'd rather spam go away entirely or i'd like to have a quarter each. it really would add up quickly.

I was a Teenage Fax-Spammer!

[jeff.paulsen]

Well, kind of.

We had a company that did outsourced corporate training. We faxed a list of our upcoming classes to our former customers once a week. Our customer list grew, and I think that our marketing people started buying lists of fax numbers and adding them to the database.

This was accomplished with two two-line Hayes JT Fax boards, IIRC, installed in an old 386 (for reference, this was the early Pentium era). I built the box, I ran the cable (a single strand of 8-wire cat 3) and kluged up four-headed RJ11 ends for it. We bought some software that could watch a directory for instruction files and pump out faxes accordingly. We would make a series of sequentially numbered .GIF files, one per page of the fax (normally two pages), and then run a little utility that took a file of numbers to send to, a file of numbers to NEVER EVER send to, and the name of the first .GIF file. It made all the control files, and I would leave for the weekend. 4000 numbers, 8000 pages, 4 lines, no problem.

Further technical note: about once a month I would go into serious log analysis mode, and remove the 50 slowest fax machines from my list. Most fax machines at the time were 9600 baud, with some 14.4kbaud, and a dwindling minority of 4800, 2400, and some 300 baud horrors. We only sent on the weekend, so it was in our interest to only target fast recipients.

Every Monday, we'd have a pile of response faxes, normally just "take me off your fax list", often with no phone number to reference, but sometimes we would get counter-spam numbering in the dozens of pages. We were happy to add anyone who wanted to the NEVER EVER send list.

The punchline: In almost a year of doing this, we had two or three people take classes because of our faxes - not nearly enough to cover the cost of the fax server, let alone my time maintaining the whole system (never less than 2 hours a week, often more like 4).

Spam is bad. It doesn't work. I can't figure out why people keep doing it. Is the word not getting out there? IT DOESN'T WORK.

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[kwerle]

Someone suggested spamassassin, but I really like ASK