Forbes Sympathizes with Poor, Abused Fax.com

An anonymous reader writes "Forbes invites sympathy for Fax.com and other junk faxers who are apparently being victimized by 'a small army of plaintiffs, attorneys and self-appointed activists', and Forbes particularly takes aim at 'the high-tech ambulance chasers' whose offenses include providing 'step-by-step instructions on Internet sites, printable legal forms and names of attorneys who specialize in the trade' to individuals who've received illegal junk faxes and want to do something about it. Because of these nasties Fax.com is 'all but out of business' and Forbes seems to be worried that email spammers might share the same fate. Help, I think I've fallen into a parallel universe."

Comments

I'd be upset too.

[Dasein]

From the article:

"Fax.com's Katz called the practice "blackmail and extortion," among other choice words. On the other hand, Fax.com didn't exactly help its cause when it sent 1,634 junk faxes in one week in 2001 to the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling, resulting in yet another successful lawsuit against the company."

Wow, let's assume that each fax page takes about 6-seconds (because you want high quality) and that each fax consists of a cover page and one page of content. Further that each fax transmission requires a 3-second handshake - 15 seconds phone time per fax. That means that 15 * 1634 = 24510 seconds or 7.8 hours of tied up phone lines. Yeah, if someone, over the course of the wee decided to tie up one of my phone lines for an entire workday, I'd be upset too.

If it were actually legal, there would be at least six other companies doing the same thing. With all that traffic, it would be hard for anyone to get a legitimate fax through.

Post Forbes Fax Numbers, PLEASE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone really needs to post a list of Forbes fax numbers at their different offices so we can all start trying to sell them penis enlargement pills.

64,583 faxes later they'll start to appreciate what we mean.

I regularly get faxes at 2 AM on my home number, on a line that hasn't been used for faxes for 5 years!!! So I hooked up a fax machine to see who was sending them, but the remove requests don't work and there are to many to try and stop them...

I was a faxer

[danec]

I was never a spammer, but I used to run a advertising supported newsletter of humor and inspirational stories that was faxed to local business five days a week. Each newsletter was one page long, and faxed in the dead of the night.

Everyone we faxed the newsletter too subscribed by placing their business card in one of our card bowls placed at restaurants around town. We didn't offer a prize or anything else with the subscription, so we weren't tricking anyone into anything.

At the bottom on the newsletter were unsubscribe instructions: write unsubscribe on this newsletter and fax it back.

Everyday we'd get unsubscribe requests, and everyday we'd process them. Many times someone would call from a business and unsubscribe one day, and then a couple days later a receptionist or something who sat near the fax machine and depended upon us for her daily chuckle would call wondering what happened to us, and we'd resubscribe them. Then, a week or two later someone from the business call and unsubscribe again, ad nasuem.

One day, without any notice, I was sued in small claims court by a local attorney who claimed that I was sending him unsolicited faxes, and as such owed him $500 for each of three faxes that he'd received unsolicited from me. The faxes weren't unsolicitied, and I had recorded in my files that someone from his office had called in to request the fax. Also in the files were notes detailing that someone had canceled, then restarted, then canceled the subscription of the course of a week and a half.

I took this information with me to court, but the judge explained that unfortunately his hands were tied and he was bound by the statute that required that I pay $500 for each of the three faxes -- no matter what the opinion of the court might have been about the excessiveness of the award.

That night, I removed every attorney and legal aide off the list, and within a year I totally ceased operation.