Stopping Overseas Fax Spam?

iotashan asks: "Likely for most businesses, unsolicited faxes have become quite a problem. They needlessly use up toner and paper, and are usually just scams anyway. Specifically, we are receiving faxes from a company called Flamingo Travel. Now, they appear to bug business across the US, and some innocent parties are falling victim. I have used their automated system for having my fax number removed, to no avail. Is my only weapon having a bunch of friends call this 800 number to make the company's overseas toll-free phone bill unbearable?"

"The latest fax listed a number to call to take advantage of the offer (800-328-9795), so I called it and asked to be removed. The woman took down my number, but rather smugly told me that they are in England so they do not have to obey the US unsolicited fax laws. She wouldn't provide me with any other company information, and then stopped answering calls from my number after repeated hang-ups. The FCC says that it is a civil matter, and to go through the courts. The Fax Preference Service in the UK says they cannot help people outside the UK. Do I have nowhere to turn except an expensive lawyer, armed with no information about the company?"

Comments

Re:Spam him back

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an interesting sig there, except that clicking on a link on a webpage won't allow a virus or a shell script to run (in a proper browser, anyway)... so it comes off as kind of high-and-mighty without being actually true.

By the way, the word in English is 'person', not 'personne'.

Public schools.

[causality]

This will sound a lot like the question, "When is the best time to plant a tree?" because the best answer to that is "20 years ago" and the next-best answer to it is "right now". But...

Public schools, like it or not, are factories of socialization and indoctrination. Why not use this positively and at the same time get schools talking about the relatively new problems spam (of all forms) causes and encourage schools to instill in students the idea that any marketer who uses intrusive tactics is untrustworthy. Let the fact that unsolicited marketing and other unpleasant business practices are a good sign that someone is trying to scam you be another thing that "everybody knows".

I prefer that to such well-known "facts" as: fluoride is good for your teeth, the government always has its citizens best interests at heart, the Patriot act is there to keep us safe, etc.

Yeah it'll probably never happen but I would love the idea of public schools doing a better job of equipping people for the real world because let's face it, the people who know what spam is about and what kind of people send it are not the people who buy products/services from spammers. This is why, although technical solutions can greatly help the spam problem, I do not believe that the heart of the matter is a technical issue so much as a social one.

Sent them GoatSE

[BigDish]

You could always send them an endless loop of goatse and tubgirl :-)