Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Firm Pays 6.5 Million for Fax Spamming

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the step-in-the-right-direction dept.

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!

9 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. fishing for spam? by CrazyDwarf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If there was a precedent set for email spammers to have to pay, would you then go put your email address everywhere fishing for spam to get paid for?

    At least with a fax number, it's not as easy to get spammed.

    --
    It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
  2. Fax vs. Email spamming by blazer1024 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I would think Fax spamming would be more costly to the receiver... You'd be using a peice of paper for every page they sent you... if you got tons, that could start costing you...

    Junk email or snail mail doesn't cost you anything.. (except it uses a tiny portion of your bandwidth) So I doubt they'd ever make spammers pay you for receiving that.

    1. Re:Fax vs. Email spamming by silentbozo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Tiny? You obviously don't do any network administration, at least nowhere important. Spam-related traffic has been estimated to upwards of 30+% on the backbones (I don't recall if this includes newsgroups - it probably does.) Spammers don't care that the addresses they send to don't exist, or that tons of bounce messages will go nowhere because they're using a false origination address. The upgrades necessary to handle this load are paid via peering fees. Your ISP pays a fee to peer, and guess who they pass the fees on to? That's right, you!

      BTW, I already run SpamAssassin where I can, and it junks about 25 pieces of crap a day, which then get reported via Procmail to SpamCop. Lots and lots of traffic as automated spam and anti-spam systems duke it out...

      Finally, I object to spammers wasting my time. It took me time to report the bastards before I got SpamAssassin, it took me time to configure SpamAssassin when the spam got way out of hand, and it takes me time to keep my filters current. My time is damn valuable, and I object to having it wasted by some low-life asshole with a dialup account and a copy of spamware (spamware authors are just as bad as worm and virus writers IMO.) And no, I'm not changing my e-mails cause that would take up even more of my time!

  3. cell spam? by taernim · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is interesting. I may be the only one, but I have recently received a lot of spam (via SMS messaging and email) on my cell phone.

    Has anyone else had this happen to them?
    Maybe I could be next getting a big payout? heh...

    --
    "PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
  4. Junk Faxes hmmm.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Now only if I could get the judge to agree to telemarketing calls as Junk Calls, and pay me up to $100 per junk call. They are wasting my time, calling me on inappropriate hours and it never stops. Can we get legislation on this?

  5. ICQ by Fuzzums · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The other day I got a spam with a ICQ-number in it. Well, what the heck, I thought and requested authorisation. To my surprise I got it. I even got the chance to talk with Mr. Spammer. It didn't get very technical.
    He had 400.000.000 addresses and 30% were outdated blah blah. it took 7 5 hour days to spam all the addresses.
    Well. all in all it was funny to talk the spammer, but it took him some time. He's wasting my time, i'll wase his.
    I also love to call a spammer if possible. Ask where he got the addresses, ask what kind of product it is and after a while tell you're not interested :)

    --
    Privacy is terrorism.
  6. Re:Fax prank by gosand · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

    I used to work for a company that created a fax-over-IP server with inboxes and the whole deal. I was in QA, and that was actually one of our tests. We dubbed it the "mobius fax".

    Although we created a service, our customers often used it for fax spamming because you could build distribution lists. Of course, distro lists were valid too, like sending a fax to everyone in a company. It was a pretty cool service, and we actually used it. Everyone had an account, and faxes would be queued up in your inbox, which could be delivered to your email account. You could also "print to fax machine" from any Windows app, which was nice too. When our investors pulled out due to the dot-com crash, Net2Phone bought up all our assets.

    I know this service exists out there, but this was a couple of years ago, and the company started about 9 years ago before email came along and hammered the business of faxing.

    --

    My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.

  7. Re:It IS getting out of hand by Moonshadow · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Well, you could annoy your email address out of a spammer's DB.

    I wrote a little script that uses a spammer's "remove" form against them. Provide a host, remove page, and the correct parameters, and it will generate a crapload of fake addresses and feed them to the spammer's "good list" database. Once you get a good half million or so into the DB, the data becomes worthless to the spammer, because he has such a little signal:noise ratio. He dumps the database.

    Our complaint with spammers is that they force us to wade through crap to get to what we want. Do the same to them.

    Get the source at http://tachyonsix.com/spamdeath.txt

  8. The Spam Difference by porkface · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Spammers will always claim you opted in somewhere along the line. As hard as we try to read privacy policies, we're not all lawyers capable of proving we didn't.

    My Consumer Responsive Anti-spam and Privacy Solution (CRAPS) proposal is that Spammers be required to show where you opted in or failed to opt out, and trace the legal transactions that landed your address in their possession. Such a law should require them to provide you with that information upon your request with reasonable frequency and delay. It won't stop Spam, but it will give American users a start at not only stopping unwanted Spam, but also limiting the propagation of your address (within the US).