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 :)

It IS getting out of hand

[IronTek]

Well, scratch that, it's been out of hand...I get many, many more junk emails to my inbox every day than legitimate emails...and I'm getting sick of it. Unfortunately, the email address is the one I've been using for years. This creates a dual problem. On one hand, everyone has it, so it would be a pain to tell everyone I've changed it. But also, since I've been using it for so long (6 years at least) it's been exposed to every single spammer on the planet.

What I want to know is where the hell are the lawmakers and the courts on this one? The senate's too busy going outside to say the pledge...get the hell back in the building and vote on some anti-spam laws!

Also, in an election year (such as this one...hey!), I'm still surprised an enterprising poltician hasn't brought this up in tech-heavy districts...I'd go out and vote if someone running for congress would at least make it sort of an issue...just give me something!

Re:It IS getting out of hand

[Moonshadow]

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

A quote from this website:

[Skreech]

"Junk faxes are not only an inconvenience to consumers, but they waste money, time and interfere with crucial businesses operations. In order to do business in today's world you need a fax machine. The intent of the machine is to communicate with friends, family, and business partners. It is not an open invitation for unscrupulous advertisers to block your phone lines, run up your operating budget, and waste paper."

- Dan Jacobson, Legislative Advocate, CALPIRG

If that doesn't make you want to buy Dan a beer, the terrorists have already won. ;) Although this quote pertains to faxes, it summarises my feelings about spam email if you replace "paper" with "bandwidth" and "phone lines" with "mail servers."

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

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.