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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?"
In the morning, when you're sober again, you'll realize that you just made a costly long distance call to fill up a few megabytes of harddisk-space on a spammer's computer. You sank to their standards and failed miserably trying to beat them at their game.
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."
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