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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 $1,500 for each such fax that you receive. More info at junkfax.org."
... but now they'll all turn to online spam instead of the dead-tree variety :-(
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
If you're in the UK and receive junk sales faxes, then you can block 99.9% of them by registering with the Fax Preference Services at www.fpsonline.org.uk.
After 1 May 1999 it became illegal to send faxes to individuals without prior consent, and businesses have the right to 'opt-out', which is what this list manages. I used to get dozens of junk faxes a week, after registering in August 2001 I have had no more than 2 or 3, so it definately works - although it takes 3-4 weeks for the block to become active.
Obviously, as it's a marketing industry-run scheme (which they had to do to prevent government-enforced action), they don't go out of their way to advertise this list, but it does work.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
The fcc order was publsihed in Micro$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!
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.
At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.
Alan Greenspan
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).
Am I missing something? Does old-fashoned faxing have a place in the modern society?
Yes, because it puts much more of the burden of the cost of the fax on the sender: they may use up your consummables (unless you have a fax-modem attached to a computer which receives and displays faxes digitally [and a large HD]), but they also [generally] have to pay to phone you. Unlike email whereby the junk mailers use other people's machines without their permission.
Plus, with dialer identification at the recipient's end, they could block any fax that doesn't identify the sender's phone number (assuming facility existed in the hardware/software) - to forge this would require cracking the phone company's computers.
Faxing is like a peer-to-peer network: you connect directly to the recipient for the delivery (as it leaves your machine, it arrives at their's) and they know who you are, unlike email in which you dump the whole message to the courier and can [fairly] easily forge the origins of it.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell
For a very simple reason - many businesses don't have internet email, but almost everybody has faxes. The pharmacy that I am the frontshop manager at does not have internet access at all, just it's own intranet. We simply cannot get email. (Head office people, of course, get whatever they want, including net access.)
Faxes are a huge part of our business - prescriptions are legal documents, we can only accept originals or copies faxed directly from doctor's offices (and for some drugs, even those are not allowed). Many doctor's offices also refuse to business by phone at all, but strictly by fax, simply so they, like us, can keep paper trails for everything. Without signatures or copies of signatures, we'd be up sh*t creek in case anything were to go wrong.
And no, *gp-signed email is not an answer. As a pharmacy, we are regulated by various provincial and federal agencies. They don't recognize a lot of stuff without hardcopy in the form of originals or faxes.
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.
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
First, the person who stated the number in the header of a fax is software driven is mostly correct. There may be newer faxes that use CallerID, but each and every fax machine I have used or seen to date sends it's own number with the fax (which is then inserted in the header).
Ever since people figured out how to cheat pay phones by phreaking and sending tones (by whistling, or use black boxes held up to the phone mic), phone switches use out of band signaling (SS7) to route calls. This means that before your call is actually placed, all the phone switches in the path from the source to destination coordinate the call (based on call translation tables, options in the switches, etc). This way a circuit is not wasted if the call can not get through. So often, when you hear a "ringing" sound, it's a "comfort tone" sent while the circuit is being established (this way you aren't left wondering, due to the "dead air", or lack of any sound).
I digressed a little. Part of the SS7 messaging that is sent back and forth included. among other things, the source of the phone call. Your caller ID block is a software feature in your local telephone company (telco) swithing office. It's illegal, but if you work for a phone company you can override and see all CallerID info, regardless if the caller has it set to "blocked".
All bets are off if you receive your calls via a PBX. Most PBXs are configured incorrectly (at some level) and can display anything from the local trunk (from the telco) for the incoming call to the actual phone number (assuming it's not blocked). But again, the PBX receives the phone number from the local telco switch that provides local service (or incoming long distance). How the info is treated in a PBX is a function of its configuration.
HTH,
John