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fax.com Finally Fined $5M For Fax Spam
originalhack writes "If you are tired of getting calls in the middle of the night with nothing but a fax calling tone, you will celebrate this. Fax.com, who is well known for wardialing in their search for fax machines and for sending junk faxes, has finally actually been fined. The long arm of the law often moves slowly, here is the order. If you don't want to wait for the feds to stop your favorite junk faxer, you can try your luck in small claims. Federal law passed in 1991 (known as the TCPA) makes it illegal to send any material transmitted via facsimile that advertises the commercial availability or quality of any property, goods, or services which is transmitted to any person without that person's prior express invitation or permission. If the fax was deliberately sent to you (as most junk faxes are), Federal law entitles you to recover a minimum of $500 and, depending the judge's discretion, up to $1,500 for each such fax that you receive. More info at junkfax.org."
... but now they'll all turn to online spam instead of the dead-tree variety :-(
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
If you're in the UK and receive junk sales faxes, then you can block 99.9% of them by registering with the Fax Preference Services at www.fpsonline.org.uk.
After 1 May 1999 it became illegal to send faxes to individuals without prior consent, and businesses have the right to 'opt-out', which is what this list manages. I used to get dozens of junk faxes a week, after registering in August 2001 I have had no more than 2 or 3, so it definately works - although it takes 3-4 weeks for the block to become active.
Obviously, as it's a marketing industry-run scheme (which they had to do to prevent government-enforced action), they don't go out of their way to advertise this list, but it does work.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
1) Build an email -> FAX gateway with catchall domain.
2) Put semantically overloaded email addresses into OPT-OUT/Cancel/Remove links on various web sites.
3) Wait for FAXES to print out.
4) Start legal procedings in small claims.
5) ...
6) Profit.
we can apply the same fine structure for every junk email was receive......
If they turn to email... Spamassassin's Bayes filter is your friend. It's damn good. ...though of course it doesn't do anything about wasted bandwitdh. :-(
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
We have no doubt that the TCPA provides more than such reasonable clarity and precision for persons of common intelligence.
It was appaling to read about fax.com's arrogance while reading through the ruling, though it really shouldn't surprise me. It's nice to see the law working.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
So this fax bit is covered now... however:
What are they doing about Telex spam? When are they going to fine telex spam?
M
Weren't they sued for some ridiculously huge amount like [dr. evil] 50 Billion Dollars [/dr. evil], or is that something else i'm thinking of?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Ya know, if fax.com had just taken the time to buy out the senators and representatives from their region, they probably would have avoided this whole mess, and they probably could have gotten away with less capital outlay - This model has been shown to work with other high profile companies
The fcc order was publsihed in Micro$oft .doc format. So I have converted it to PDF with OpenOffice.org's one click PDF technology.
Read it here
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
the State hits down hard on free enterprise.
Fax.com might not have been doing something that made people feel all warm and gooey inside, but it was contributing to the economy and giving people valuable employment. Like all government intervention in business, this will lead to inefficiency and stagnation. The free market should be left to decide these matters, not lawyers and government departments.
After all, the immorality or varying amounts of illegality of spam wouldn't slow them down compared to war-dialing for fax in the middle of the night.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
You mean all of those modem handshakes after I got a cable modem were real? I thought I was just having nightmares about my old 2400... nooooooo
Uhm... wow, all hail Michael, here to save us from junk-faxes. Is this guy for real? Is he running for office, and/or trying to cover up the fact that they really can't do much about junk mail?
Unlike what one should expect regarding the parent's karma, this is a legitime court order, not the goatse.
I just hope it will not switch to a goatse pic once upmodded.
I really have not had a problem with fax spam in about...10 years, or more.
I hate sigs.
The presidents addresses are included at the end of the document. If every slashdot reader sends him 1 or 2 items of junk mail then we can get revenge. What's $5m to them anyway? 100tonnes of junk mail is more like it :)
yeah, i hate it when drug dealers who sell drugs to kids get locked up, i mean, wtf! they're helping the economy by buying from abroad and selling it off in the US, as the middle man he takes a lot of the profit as well as delivering a quality product into the US.
Free the drug dealers!
--- any post that takes longer than 20 seconds to write, isn't worth writing
This brings up the question of why Fax machines are still used anymore. Any slightly experienced computer user can easily send a color JPEG scan of a document via email in about the same time it would take to send a fax. For the technophobes, why isn't there some type of terminal that emulates faxing though email? It could either connect to an office ethernet or dial into an ISP at 56k, and send a scanned document as a color JPEG to any email address (which would probably be faster than traditional faxes, which send uncompressed TIFFs at 14.4kbps). If the recipient doesn't have a computer, the machine could function as a email to paper gateway, collecting and printing from a cheap POP3 email account. Am I missing something? Does old-fashoned faxing have a place in the modern society?
What the fuck does caring about the future of the planet that you live on have to do with recieving UNREQUESTED spam?? You sound like you maybe you work for fax.com and are just pissed that we finally got you!!
Just like Ralsky we now have the address of a piece of filth. Can everyone send him just 2 items of junk mail. The world will be a better place :D
The Commission also stated that Fax.com's "primary business itself constitutes a massive on-going violation" of the law, and that Fax.com's citation responses, as well as publicly available information contained on its website, suggested that Fax.com apparently intentionally and willfully violated the Act and our rules and orders....As a result, the Commission determined that Fax.com was apparently liable for a proposed forfeiture of $5,379,000, the statutory maximum.
So they've been slow, but thank goodness they haven't minced their words or pulled their (legal) punches.
Now if only we could move onto email spammers who, without a doubt, cause much more nuisance, grief, and cost to network maintainers (and ultimately us).
You can call them at 800.966.5329 to ask about it. In fact, I think that in the interest of making sure we have the story straight it would be a good idea for 300,000 or 400,000 of us to call. What do you think?
I have a pile of junk faxes left over from before I gave up and switched my fax machine off auto-answer. They are the usual kind, toner cartridges, vacation specials, and so on. Is there any simple way to tell if they came from fax.com? I'll be happy to send them to some plaintiff somewhere if it will get more money out of the junk faxers. Getting some of that money myself as a side effect would be nice but is not necessary.
Started getting these calls and thought it would be fun to fool the machine by whistling 2400 baud connection tones...boy was that a mistake!
Simple as that. There have been calls to make emails legal documents, but it may be a while.
Also I think you need to read up on faxes. They do not "send uncompressed TIFFs at 14.4kbps; they send CCITT compressed monochrome images at some pretty low speed, depending on the fax machine, as low as 300 baud (there are still many very slow machines out there).
The fact is that a fax machine requires no infrastructure and works as long as the phone system works. Like it or not, your "cheap email to paper gateway" still relies on a hell of a lot of infrastructure (dialup servers, internet connections at the server end, storage space, pop email) that isn't needed for a fax machine.
Also anytime this stuff gets stored, there's a chance for it to be lost or stolen. One of the attractive features of faxes is that they move immediately from sender to recipient across a closed and protected-by-federal-law network.
There is a similar service called the MPS that you can register with to block third part Postal Mailings.
As with the FPS the MPS is also a Third Party only legal requirement. If you have given your details to someone, they have the right to continue to send you material by Fax and Post, just they cant rent it out to anyone else.
There is a legal requirement for all list owners (! there is such a professional title !) to clean their data against the MPS and FPS. If your name is on the list, and you get something in the post / fax, you can claim compensation!
If you look on the website http://www.dmaconsumers.org/ [ dmsconsumers.org ] - there is an email Pref Service ( E-MPS ) there as well. The last time I went into this issue to any great detail, they were looking to see if they can make it a legal requirement along the lines of the MPS for third party email data rental work.
All this, as Jolyon, has already said - to keep the Direct Marketing Industry in the clear from Govt Action.
Commercial speech isn't protected, but you knew that anyway.
Oh man, I'm confused. What to think? I thought TCPA was bad!
-Anonymous Slashtard
Is there any way for Canadians to stop the evil junk faxes? I've had enough all-black ads w/ white lettering offering me a deal on new toner.
The most amazing thing was that some of them even replied. In which case I did send teh fax again (in 512 point again offcourse, making them pay another solid 6 meter of paper and half a fax cartridge) One of them seemed smart enough to send back a message in 512 point size too, which costed me nothing since I received faxes on my mac. Nowadays many spammers use this feature too, or don't let the fax machine accept my reply. I gave up faxing a long time ago anyway
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
I receive tons of junk faxes and I am in Canada. And other slashdot reader know what the law is in Canada?
-joe
You mean, the federal law from the same juridiction that brought us Echelon, Carnivore and the PATRIOT act?
Kinda nice for sales types who are always on the road. Which would be great, except we were developers, who hardly ever even used fax at all. If we were lucky, the phone would ring, we would pick it up and, like, "beep beep beep" (thank you Ellen Feiss). The unlucky wouldn't be at their desk, it would get stored in voicemail, and their number would get registered as a "live fish", to be dialed again.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Check out Fax Wars. Tom Martino (The TroubleShooter) of nationally syndicated radio fame has a network of attorneys who are actively pursuing these fax-spammers. You simply bundle your junk faxes together, sign-over the litigation rights and send them the faxes (snail mail). In return, for every paument they receive on your faxes, they return a portion of the settlement to you. So, you get paid, for doing nothing but collecting them.
I need to buy a fax machine...
Wait. How is the comment a troll? Boo, moderator, boo.
----- You're a signature.
I installed spamassassin a few months ago, and it was great to begin with. Recently tho, it has been letting one or two items of blatant spam through with a hit count of 0.0, which I find is a bit strange. Anyone encountered this?
About two days later we got a call from a guy who said he was going to sue us.. The powers-that-be said, "Hyuck, hyuck, go ahead buddy..." and he did.
He won pretty handily in court too as I recall. The company ended up paying a $500 fine for the fax, a $100ish fine for court costs PLUS $500ish in legal fees to the plainiff.
Needless to say, the-powers-that-be NEVER tried junk-faxing again (never mind it was a stupid idea in the first place).
If there is, I'm going to stick an old fax machine on my land line and wait for the money to start rolling in :)
If you're getting a lot of junk faxes and don't have time for small claims court, you can sic Tom Martino's army of lawyers on them. The details are on a site he set up for just this purpose at faxwars.com.
Tom is a consumer advocate who has a radio program during the day (although some stations, such as KEX tape-delay the program to the evenings). The show's web site is troubleshooter.com.
Nathan
I sued Fax.com last year for two faxes I received from them. I sued for $500 for each fax and an additional $200 for legal fees. The total was $1200. When they were served, they called to settle the suit. They offered $200 bucks, and I laughed at them.
To make a long story short, I sued in small claims, and won. Not only did they have to pay me, but they also were fined by the Alameda Country Courts.
I strongly suggest anyone to file suit. It only costs $30 bucks and it's an easy win.
I'm hoping that there is a similar law in Canada as I was receiving about 5 fax calls a day for a while. The phone company said that I could block the calls for an additional fee of $7.95/month. I wasn't too happy with that and gave them both barrells (Disclaimer - I'm not a postal employee).
I have been noticing that the sendmail log files on my heavily SPAMmed server are getting smaller over time:
56M Jan 2 03:10 syslog.0
72M Dec 26 03:10 syslog.1
87M Dec 19 03:10 syslog.2
89M Dec 12 03:09 syslog.3
88M Dec 5 03:10 syslog.4
100M Nov 28 03:10 syslog.5
135M Nov 21 03:10 syslog.6
114M Nov 14 03:09 syslog.7
Does anyone else see this happening?
Do you know if the calling party info provided with incoming calls on an ISDN PRI is always accurate or right? I've never seen an incoming call on our RAS setup from a blocked or unavailable number -- there is ALWAYS something in that field.
I wonder if "Caller ID block" is something that applies to PRIs, or if its only applies to analog caller ID.
I just wish they'd give us enough money to upgrade our voice switch to use PRI. I'd love to get incoming FAX spam numbers for revenge calls.
I think I actually detest junk faxers more than spammers.
From what I've read of fax.com, they make spammers look like upstanding citizens.
The hubris of the junk faxers is beyond the pale. Their attitude is simply, "Try and stop us. We're making a lot of money. Fine us if you want, shut us down, we'll change our business name and continue. Just try and stop us, 'cause you can't."
That's an attitude that befits an organized crime operation, which is basically what fax.com is. They commit the same federal crime a hundred thousand times a day.
The $5M fine will have exactly zero impact on that company. They'll make that money back in a week.
What's needed is a permanent injunction barring any current or past employee or executive of fax.com from ever sending a fax again or ordering a fax sent under any circumstances. That way none of them can set up shop under a new name without being found in contempt of court and jailed. Actually, barring them from ever touching a computer or sending email would be good, too, just to keep them away from becoming spammers.
Someone out there is suing fax.com for something like 4 trillion dollars. That would be great to win, and would probably put fax.com out of business, but without an injunction against the people who run fax.com, they'll set up shop and start over again. These people are utterly intractable, and will stop jamming our fax machines under only two conditions... imprisonment or death.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
I was woken up many times in the night from faxes, and I didn't even have a fax machine, so I don't have any paper trail of being bombarded by calls. Does the money just go to the state or do the victims get any?
The $1,500 is for deliberately-sent faxes ("knowing or willful"). The $500 is for any unsolicited fax at all, *even if it's an accident*.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Ummm, Actually you *CAN* do something about junk mail. Go to the Post Office and ask for Form 1500. Fill it out, and initial Box A which states that *YOU* declare the attached item to be a pandering and/or erotic advertisement.
The USPS will issue a Prohibitory Order against the mailer. They must, within 30 days, cease and desist from any and all mailings to you under any form of your name or address. They can't sell, rent, lease, or gift your address. It must be deleted from their mailing lists and added to their suppression lists.
There it must stay for 5 years from the date of application, or the date of last enforcement whichever is later.
If they do send you some crap after you get the PO, then you send the crap they sent you with the following statement on it:
"I received this in violation of Prohibitory Order <number> on <date> Signed <your sig>"
You send it to the Prohibitory Order Processing Center in Memphis, TN. They review it and send you a letter stating that they agree or disagree (they usually agree), and that they are notifying the mailer not to do it again... That usually does the trick...
If it doesn't (ummm, Chicago Tribune - this means you!), then the USPS has a Determination that is sent to the local federal attorney (prosecutor) for the district you live in. The prosecutor files a lawsuit on your behalf (no cost to you) against the mailer to force compliance with the law... The mailer then gets to explain to a FEDERAL Judge why they can't read and obey the law...
I have about 300 Prohibitory Orders, and I receive very very little junk mail. That which I receive, I mark "REFUSED" and put it right back in the box. If it's first class, the PO sends it back to the mailer and charges them for return postage. If it's not 1st class, the PO can toss it out... Sometimes my mail carrier gets pissed and refuses to take my refused mail, so I give it to my PostMaster and that usually fixes the problem (although, one mail man did get fired)... If I get more than one piece from a mailer, then I file a Prohib Order against them...
All of this is supported by a couple of cases that went before the US Sup Ct. where they say, in part, that you, and you alone have complete and unfettered discretion in determining what is and is not considered to be a pandering and/or erotic advertisement. The only thing the USPS can do is to issue the order upon application by a recipient of a mailing. To be clear, you can declare a dry goods catalog to be erotic if you so desire...
It takes a bit of work, but it can be accomplished. Take control of your mailbox!
The FCC's order is one of those rare legal gems that makes you laugh as you read it.
Laugh at the moronic arguments put forth by Fax.com
Laugh at the arrogance which fax.com exudes...
Laugh at the fact that fax.com says "Yeah, we do things that are illegal, we never checked to see if they were on the list or not, we ran opt-out #'s that didn't work, and we lied to our clients... And oh yeah, ummm, your Order is [so totally bogus] on First, Fifth, and Eighth Ammendment grounds"... Laugh when the FCC says "ahhh, you just admitted that you did illegal stuff, and you don't provide any evidence to us to refute our allegations, so ummm, no it's not against the 1st, 5th, or 8th...
Laugh when Fax.com says "We don't like the way your worded the Order... change it!" and the FCC says "No."
I haven't laughed this hard since I read the US Sup Ct's decision against the junk mailers who were whining about their supposed rights to annoy anyone, at any time, in any manner they so desired back in the 70's...
A bunch of fucken assholes who deserve ever penny of the fine that they got... Actually they deserve to be taken out and pummelled with the fax machines they've caused to break and the empty toner cartridges as a result of their non-stop assault on everyone, but that might not happen just yet...
Actually, that gives me an idea... Since the name/address of the fax.com scumbags is listed in the Order (ummm, page 14 or 15 I think), how about sending them junk toner carts and broken fax machines... Put them in a box without a return address, and send it POSTAGE DUE to them... Just put one stamp on the box...