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Fax-Spam -- What Can One Do?
phoneAlone asks: "Recently a friend has moved into a new home, where his phone number was previously used as a fax-line and receives a frequent amount of faxes all hours of the day and night. Attempts to contact the senders of this "fax-spam" and be removed from these lists are unsuccessful. What is your experience with fax-spams? What actions (legal or otherwise) can be used to combat this?"
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At the risk of suggesting something fairly dramatic, the individual in question may have to resort to changing their phone number (which may be disastrous for a business, or merely an extreme annoyance for a home). First, some other possibilities:
1. Depending on the country, and phone company that we're dealing with, it may be possible to get the phone number(s) of the caller(s), and, while not blocking them, try to contact them. This could still be legit, despite first appearances.
2. Try changing phone company (if 1 doesn't work). Or, at least, ask different companies about the possibility of blocking certain phone numbers.
3. Finally, change phone number. This will certainly be extremely annoying for your friend, especially if they are running a business from home.
If you are able to work out who this fax-spammer _is_, you may be able to sue for stalking or some similar crime. Unfortuantely, the options would vary from country-to-country, and possibly state-to-state.
--- Egads, I glow in the dark!
You could use/code an application to reply to any incomming fax's with a fax saying to stop.
This could be expensive.
Best thing to do is to change the number..
why put up with it ?
Changing the number is obvious, but how about receiving faxes to a computer software? That way, paper is not wasted for one.
And if the new location has phone lines too, try switching the fax and phone lines. You'll get plenty of beeping calls, but they should disappear as their sends will be unsuccessful.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Getting a new number is preferable to legal or technical measures simply because there is very little you can do to clean your number, it takes long and is hard work. If a new number is not an option, your best bet is to have a combined answering-fax-machine screen your calls. If you're not interested in the faxes, just don't supply paper and all fax-calls will fail.
Tell them your situation (any half-assed phone co. would have records on hand to find the culprit number), tell them to block said number.
If faxes persist, send the phone company a letter with a hefty dose of legalese, reminding them of the fact they are charging you for something you have already told them to stop. Companies tend to take people more seriously when they show resolve and are seemingly willing to settle the situation in court.
At this point, the phone company is pissed and will turn it's efforts towards the culprit. Worked for me, should definately work for you.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
fax spam is illegal under the federal telecommunications statutes, with severe penalties, even to working fax numbers. the phone company is able to trace these numbers, so request a trace from them after explaining what is happening, if they refuse to provide it or after you have the number, contact the FCC or send a demand letter indicating you will be contacting the FCC.
this happened to my parents; the above remedy does in fact work. best of luck!
U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
1.) Acquire a fax machine.
2.) Connect to above mentioned abused phone line.
3.) Print three sheets of paper that contain the message in large obnoxious print:
Stop Faxing Me At 555-(myphonenumberhere)!
(or whatever you'd like to say)
4.) Tape the top of sheet two to the bottom of sheet one, tape the top of sheet three to the bottom of sheet two. (this order may have to be inverted depending on how your fax machine feeds and scan pages (bottom to top, top to bottom) etc. Figure out the proper order to do step 5 correctly.)
5.) Feed sheet one into your recently borrowed/acquired fax machine on the phone line. Dial and transmit to the offending non responsive party.
6.) Once page one has transmitted, and the machine is working on page two, tape the bottom of page three to the top of page one so your transmitting fax machine has a nice three page loop of your message.
7.) Leave fax machine and go to bed. By morning the offensive party will have dozens of copies of your message (as many as the number of sheets their fax paper tray contained), hopefully making enough of an impression upon them that fax spam truly is annoying, and they just might consider ceasing to do it to you.
All in all, it's an old trick and I by no means take credit for it. It's a very immature act, and pretty much a bad idea. You would be just as guilty of harassment as the offending party. However, if all else fails....
Beware blue cats moving at
Ya know, federal law states that you can collect $500 for every unsolicited fax you receive at your number, and if you can show that the fax was sent knowingly to one who didn't wish to receive it, you can receive treble damages in the amount of 3 times the statuatory penalty, or $1500. you could quit your job and just collect money from junk fax judgements.
The first result was junkfaxes.org. Another site is starting a class action lawsuit againt fax.com, one of the most previlant junk faxers. Fax.com also happens to be the scumbags faxing my line at least once a day, even when I shut off the fax machine.
The bottom line is you can't do it alone. The only way to get any results is to join a class action suit, or get the FCC involved. They will either fabricate evidence to stall and/or increase you legal expenses, or if you do win, they will just refuse to pay. I have no time right now to bother with this crap, so I just save all the faxes and hope I'll get a few bucks when the class action suit goes through.
After a week of getting phone calls every frickin' weekday morning from well-meaning folks who wanted to buy ball or roller bearings, I scrounged up the correct number for the company and started giving it out.
After the second week, I called Verizon, explained that they'd issued us a number that was still listed in the yellow pages as being someone else, and said that I wanted a number that had been out of service for more than six months. (They do know how long numbers have been out of service.) We got another one that same day.
If I'd been a little more irritated, I would have held out for one with no 1's or 0's that spelled some cool word, like "welcome" or "welfare" or "welders." (Oh, but then I'd get calls about welding, I just know it...)
If you can find out THEIR fax number, fax them back a black sheet of paper--this will use up all THEIR toner and will make YOU feel better!
Fax spam is a tort. You can sue the originators. Talk to a lawyer.
These days, the best this trick will accomplish is to tie up one of the fax spammer's lines for a few seconds, and that's if anything is even set to answer on ring. Most bulk faxing nowadays
..." followed by a number overseas, which they know damned well nobody is going to pay to call. Typical spammer tactics. I've even received faxes asking me to send a fax saying "Yes" or "No" to some 1-900 number to vote on something or another. Sadly I imagine they probably made a killing from bored office assistant types "voting" on their company's dime.
a) is done with computers, not with fax machines, thus there is no paper/toner on the spammer's end to waste
b) is done by someone with enough lines that tying one up won't affect them
Bulk faxes typically come from places who have set up an operation to perform that specific task and then contract their services out to all takers. It's similar to telemarketing, in that someone sets up a fax center (search "broadcast fax" and look for the shady ones) full of computers, modems, and phone lines. Then $COMPANY_A pays the fax center to blast their ad to a certain number of recipients. When you get a fax hawking $PRODUCT_X, it didn't come from the people who are selling that product, they paid someone else to send it.
In the case of most fax spam I've received, very few of them provide a fax number as a point of communication anyway, so figuring out where to try a fax bomb can be time-consuming. The contact point in the majority of my fax spam is generally a URL. (If you've gotten any fax spam, I presume you've gotten the one from some scam operation[s] claiming they'll design your company's website for free, to "gain valuable experience" and/or "train their students," if you agree to pay for a year's worth of webhosting services at some exorbitant price...)
Every now and then, I'll get one that says "To stop receiving these faxes, send a fax with your phone number to
Oddly enough, even though fax spam has a higher monetary cost than email spam, I tend to Just Hit Delete on the faxes, even though I report a lot of the email spam I get.
An interesting aside: a colleague of mine has a 1-800 number for her fax machine, and never advertises whatever the local ringthrough number is, she only promotes the toll-free number. She has never received a single fax spam. Her theory - and a very interesting one - is that, because owners of toll-free numbers receive bills containing a list of every number who has called them, fax spammers avoid them for fear of being "found."
--
Rate Naked People at Fuck Meter! (not work-safe)
I listen to Tom Martino in the evening. His website is www.troubleshooter.com. You can listen to it streaming at www.1190kex.com from.. oh I think it's 7pm pacific to 11pm. (I'm doing this from memory, sorry if I'm in error.) Basically, it's a nation-wide radio show devoted to helping the little guy. It's an interesting show because when a company does something wrong, this show works to right the wrong.
Tom Martino *hates* fax spam. So he had a website set up dedicated to busting fax spam. Basically, you send this site the fax, and they pursue it for you. It's www.faxwars.com.
"Derp de derp."
I clerk at a hotel, we get a fax to our main number every now and then, I just put the fax calls on hold. They are the ones paying for the call, we have 5 lines in so I'm not blocking incoming cals, let them spend a little more money on the call than usual. The fax machines try to connect for about 2-10 minutes and hang up.
What would be cool is a getty hack that would keep re-handshaking on the fax, so you are in a perpetual handshake state with the fax on the other end. Get one of those boxes that will split out the fax calls, put a box with this getty on the other end, cron the getty to run at night, or off hours, and let them rack up the long distance charges.
I had just this problem when I moved into my previous house - we were getting 5 or 6 fax calls per night, at all hours. Unfortunately, I couldn't just rip the phone out of the wall, as I needed to be contactable by work also.
Luckily, here in Britain, I was able to through our number in on the Facsimile Preference Service which put a stop to it almost immediately. Any further faxes then would have landed the sender a rather large fine for each one they send.
"When I grow up, I want to be a weirdo"
a couple years back I had the problem the other way round, only one phone line but needed phone and fax
I used a phone/fax-switch for that problem then.
For example: http://faxswitch.com/sr_next.html (no advertising intended, just an example. Really.)
Something like this might stop at least your phone from ringing all the time.
bye, Chris
Change phone numbers. Not much is invested in the new number (since it's new) so change it. Much easier than tracking down the faxers. Try to get the phone co to pay for the transfer due to "quality of life" issues.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
A friend of mine had this problem once, so what he did was to take a plain piece of paper and write something like 'Call xxxxxxxxx to make this stop', then faxed this to the number that was spamming him and as the top came out, he quickly cellotaped it to the bottom of the paper, making a continuous loop - note this would only work using a cheapish fax machine that works with rolls of fax paper.
After about 10 minutes or so, he received a call from a pretty hysterical person, who seemed to have the idea that they were dealing with a lunatic. The fax DOSing stopped and he never received a fax from them again.
Fax-Spammers fax.com Sued For 2.2 Trillion
You've attempted to contact the senders unsucessfully (its not stated whether you were successful in contacting them or not, and they just didn't bother to remove you from your list). Send them a letter stating that for each fax you will seek damages allowed under US law ($500/fax). This should scare some away, and you might be able to nail a couple in small claims court. Also, join the class action lawsuit against fax.com, they might be behind many of the faxes. Of course IANAL ...
If you can get the numbers of the offenders....
SUE THE BASTARDS
Unlike spamming, there are very clear laws about junk faxes. If you have contacted these assholes and they refuse to stop, they are in violation of law, and you can file against them.
Nothing says "SHUT THE FUCK UP AND STOP BOTHERING ME" like a summons to court.
Of couse, the prerequisite to this is:
HIRE A LAWYER RATHER THAN BITCHING ABOUT IT ON SLASHDOT!
www.eFax.com are spammers
Fax.com response to lawsuit
Quote from the article:
"... Katz refutes such charges and says that any recipient who wishes not to receive fax advertisements need only call the toll free number that appears on every fax distributed by Fax.com in accordance with California law"
Yeah right! If it was only that easy to remove yourself from their lists.
A picture of the goatse.cx guy with the caption "This will be you if you don't stop faxing me"
By mistake some user entered in the wrong fax number for a company in our system. Some poor woman in Alaska was receiving these calls in the middle of the night from us. Eventually, I had a call from an ATT&T operator reach my desk as head of I.T.. She gave me the number that we were erroneously faxing to, and I tracked it down in the system. I called the woman to apologize personally. I would suggest your friend contact their phone company and explain what is happening. The phone company will then get in touch with the company doing the faxing and the problem will be resolved.
One alternative that I favor is to 'fight back'.
I've had instances where my land-line voice phone has rung at 10 minute intervals over and over again and a fax machine was on the other end of the line. It was obvious that someone thought it was a fax-answering number.
My solution, and one that I've read about elsewhere, is to figure out what number is calling (dialing #69 has worked a few times in my case) and send 'faxes' back at them. If you have a Data/Fax modem on your system or one you can use (I use ADSL for internet now), set up a few multiple-page solid black documents to send back at them. If you use Windows 2000 it is trivial to set up the 'fax services' like a regular printer.
A solid black document will do one of two things, if sent to a fax machine that directly prints what it has received. It will either:
1) burn out the stylus on a thermal fax machine, where the heat-stylus is only expected to 'write' for a limited duty cycle.
2) spray out a whole expensive cartridge full of ink onto a few pages.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Like most problems, this one has a social fix. Call the phone company, patiently explain your situation, and politely ask for a new phone number (if by then they don't offer the suggestion themselves). They probably won't charge you a dime.
You might be too antisocial to handle making a phone call to the only people who can actually solve your problem. In that event, there's a couple of rational ways of living with it:
Invest a few dollars in a voice/fax switch; install in an appropriately out-of-the-way location. Connect your telephones to the "phone" jack, and nothing to the "fax" jack.
Or find an old, external SupraFAXModem which supports Silent Answer. Program its default NVRAM registry appropriately to answer only fax calls. Connect it to any available phone jack. It will tie up the line for a few seconds, realize there's no PC connected after the handshake, and then drop carrier. No computer or rewiring required.
At what point did the standard answer on Slashdot become "sue the bastards"? I sense a double standard.
It's just a fucking telephone.
Kid-proof tablet..
And though it took a little while, it certainly solved the problem...
I was getting the fax calls primarily in bursts - every week or two, but when they came, the machine would apparently retry each 15 minutes for the first hour, then every hour or two for a while... even if this was during the wee hours of the morning. This particular fax machine would also leave voice mails "beep....... beep....". Not real good.
I ended up running *57 traces on them, and calling the phone company's Annoyance/Harrasing Call Center (or whatever it was called. They refunded the *57 trace costs, then apparently contacted (whether directly or via law crew) the offending party, and the calls stopped for over 6 months.
The started again, I followed the same procedeure (2 or three traces), and the phone company confirmed it was the same group calling, and after that go-round, I heard no more from the fax machine.
A pain, but it solved the problem.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Two years ago I used to get 3-5 fax spams a day at my home, and about 10-15 at my place of work.
I added out telephone numbers to the fax marketing opt-out list at www.dma.org.uk and in 60 days they had stopped dead.
I have had two junk faxes in that entire time since then. If only others things in life were so simple.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
When somebody calls you after you ask them not to, especially if it wakes you up all hours of the night, that is harassment.
He should use caller ID to find out who is doing it (sounds like he already has). Contact them. If it happens again, file in small claims court.
Almost all US phone systems now have Call Blocking. When you receive an incoming fax call, hang up, and then pick up the phone and dial *60, and follow the instructions. You will never ever receive a call from that number again. Anyone who dials you from that number will be intercepted, and not get through. Problem solved.
Warning: I heard that there is a charge for this service, something like $1 per blocked number. I've never used it, so call your local telco for details.
if you can trace the phone number and the owner of tat number refuses to listen to you, send them a fax snake.
what is a fax snake? tape at least three pieces of paper together at the long ends. write a nice message asking to remove you from their list the long way across all three pages. feed the first page into the fax and senf it. as the first sheet comes out and the last goes in, tape the first to the last.
Let this run all night. in the morning, the owner of the nuber will have hundreds of sheets of paper in their hopper asking for your removal. this was often doen in the olden days.. and can be a fun prank. The older machines held more paper than the newer fax/copy/scan machines, so you could over run the hopper and strew papers all over the floor in front of the fax machine.
also note... this is illeagal. if they turn you in you face the same punishment that they would face if you turn them in.
Could you sue the company saying that their 'wardialing' or 'hacking' caused you to change your phone number, and lose money in the process?
Tibbon
tibbon.com
You have to pay, but you can dial a code to trace the phone numbers that the calls are coming from... the code is *57 for Verizon in NY.
Then you can call the police and have them take care of it. Spam Faxing is a crime... and you might end up making a few thousand dollars out of the deal!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
So how did you answer? Did you yell to them, "I have no balls!" :-)
Actually, it happened to me. I feel your pain. First I got a number that was very close to the sales dept. of a local pipe and welding company (only they were in a new area code). Once, I got a particularly nasty call at 6AM: a guy was pissed that a message he left (on my phone answering machine of course) had been ignored, and since that message asked for a quote for a large order, he complained *I* was a slacker, a saboteur and an asshole.
I called the pipe company, asked for the sales director, explained the situation. The guy started a call campaign: He called every large and medium customer and made sure they had their new number. Now that's responsible behavior.
Since I valued my sanity, I asked the phone company for a new number anyway. No problemo: a few weeks later, I had my new number...
...which formerly belonged to a professional nurse who left the profession. So now I was swamped with calls of panicked geezers asking me why I didn't return their calls about an injection or an urgent enema. That was progress.
I guess you can't win.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
the fax machine here in my home office gets flooded with fax spam, currently it all goes to the computer 9it's a canon multipass laser), gonna hopefully switch to WinFAX pro soon but all i do is push DELETE.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
I got 2-3 junk faxes a day. I recycled 'em, but after a while it just bugged me.
I actually just used the opt-out 800-number at the bottom of each one, and within a week I was down to ZERO junk faxes. In the past year, I have had exactly one.
Note that this isn't the same as "attempting to contact the sender" -- the sender couldn't care less. The vendor couldn't care less. But the opt-out system seems to have real impact on the phone number lists.
There ya go. Not nearly as entertaining as the brainstorming of a bunch of geeks, but it's honest, it's legal, and it has worked dandy.
--
Just call your local attorney general for advice.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
if so, try what I did for my boss at a computer company a few years ago.
dust off your old BBS-client software, plug their sales response number (if 800, mind you.) into your software phone book, and set the retries to 99 (or 999 if you can). then script the thing to keep dialling the number all night.
800 numbers are charged back to the owner on a per-call basis. even if it's just a 3-5 second delay, then a hang up.
Charge THEM for your time using the same medium that they are. There is an elegance in eye-for-an-eye.