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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."
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?
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?
Really? Why faxes compared to any other phone call with caller id blocked? (The phone number on the fax itself is generated by software. Trivial to remove or change.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
It's apparently illegal to not put an accurate originating number on the fax itself. Not that junk faxers are bothered by that in the slightest, since junk faxing itself is illegal.
It's because of this that self governed schemes always make me nervous - you never really know if they've put an expiry on the block, and will just try again to see if you're still on the same number, or just keep spamming you until they receive an 'official' warning from the governing body.
I personally find most forms of unsolicited promotion really annoying - especially people hawking on the streets! - and think all forms should all be banned by legislation. There is absolutely no reason why any form of spamming should be tolerated by society and our governments.
Here's another little snippet from the FCC's Order:
Section 227(b)(1)(C) of the Act prohibits any person from using "a telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine."
It's interesting that the act doesn't allow you to send unsolicited ads from a computer to a fax machine, but doesn't go as far as prohibiting sending them from a computer to a computer (even if it was receiving faxes).
It seems like this act could have been used to kill off email spam long ago, if only it was worded slightly differently. What a pity.
Really? Why faxes compared to any other phone call with caller id blocked?
Our dialup networking PRI at work always reports a calling party number for inbound calls. In some instances its bogus as it represents an outbound trunk number or some other number you might not immediately associate with the calling party. However, there's a number associated with every incoming call on the PRI, so, depending on what kind of incoming line you have you may get a number whether the calling party tries to hide it or not.
And then there's the phone company, who, if sufficiently motivated, will provide that information for you. I think that even caller-ID masked (ie, anonymous) calls are only anonymous when the phone switch that terminates them to the recipient masks the calling party number. The calling party number is available and tracable by the phone company, I'm guessing its a necessity of operating a phone network.
Where it would get tricky, though, is if the phone lines were paid for by company X, who leased space to company Y, who leased computers and modems to company Z, who did work for company A, and you can never get your hands on the people doing the actual naughty deeds.
Our latest success story,... On July 26, 2002...
Looks like it been a bit lean for them recently
From http://www.fax.com/Company_profile/our_business.as p
Fax.com has identified over 30 million untouched fax numbers
What ever that means (aside from how they may have accidentally found them)
mailto:EatSpamAndDie@princeweb.com
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).