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What Can You Do to Stop Junk Faxes?
olddoc asks: "I am having a growing problem with junk faxes. Unlike email, it costs me money when I get a fax so junk faxes really tick me off. A while ago, I gave my number to a removal number and now I am getting more junk faxes than ever."
What options are there for dealing with this? If you've also had this problem, what did you do and how effective was it in stopping unwanted faxes?
And get rid of your fax machine!
I'd be surprised if there's not a fax machine with this capability already.
Fax them back with a bunch of black paper taped into a loop.
Return the favour with a message to the effect of "take this number off your call list". If it continues, you can go to the authorities to get them fined for huge amounts. Supposedly.
At our office we turned off auto-answer on the fax machine proper and set up FAX receiving on a PC plugged into the FAX line to receive them. Now all the incoming faxes are just saved in the computer. The ones we want we print out, the spam you can just delete.
University - a box of academia nuts.
I've always favored artillery barrages. Gets the point across nicely.
It's polite to use small guns (37mm to 75mm) as a first warning, then if they persist bring in the 155mm guns.
The biggest troublemakers are no match to an Iowa-class 16" rifle.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The best option I know of is to use a computer with a modem as a fax mechine. I have done this and it works rather well. you will also be able to "email" fax mechines with this setup.
There are also some services to email your faxes to you, prices range from a couple bucks to $25 a month. I havent used eny of these so I cant say if one is better then another. But if your looking in that direction google for "internet fax service"
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
XXX#######
We had junk faxes to the amount that it represented 90% of what it was used for. Then we got rid of it. If they can't email it, mail it, or call us. Then we don't want their business.
By law, faxes in the U.S. must have a "call to remove" number. But I discovered that the number does not work via a little experiment. I called the removal line, entered a different number (a voice line that had never received faxes), and then (within a few days) started receiving fax calls on the voice line. It's just like the email spammers that use victim's unsubscribe notices to signal that they have a live recipient. I'm sure a legal-minded soul could use this behavior to honeypot the faxers, but IANAL.
I've also thought about creating an autodialer script to call the fax removal line and submit every number in the phonebook to it. A simple script could send Hayes commands to a modem to dial the removal line, wait X seconds (or punch "1" to remove or whatever), and then send another dial command to submit bogus removal numbers. Poisoning their DB of faxable numbers would make the return per dialed number much much lower.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Not a lot of help if you're in the rest of the world, but still - this could be useful to somebody!
I imagine if you put your fax number on the "do not call" registry, there's some legal compunction not to perform any sort of unsolicited transactions using that number.
I keep a fleet of submarines specially for this purpose.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
If your fax number is on a DNC list, you should have some legal recourse for businesses who ignore this list, but any resolution would likely not be a speedy one.
OTOH, you could retaliate. Tape two or three pieces of black paper end-to-end, then these two ends together to make a continous loop of black paper in your fax machine. Send this black fax to them for awhile which should take care of their tonner/ink cartridge. (This won't t have a high quotient of annoyance if they are using an electronic fax service.)
Also, you could publish their phone/fax number on the Internet. I've seen forums that where this is done, and it becomes kind of a DOS attach against businesses who appear to ignore the DNC list in their telephone spaming.
A USB fax modem with memory is handy for this sort of thing. Just delete the ones you don't want, archive/print/whatever the rest.
A better idea is to install a tolled number as your fax number. You can actually do both. Fax modem *and* tolled number. 1/2$ per call. Then post your fax number everywhere. Instant profit. You'll have ROI for your fax modem in an instance. You get just get the best there is with no need to worry. Zyxel used to have some with internal memory that ran on their own with no PC needed. Refinance your real customers who fax you stuff in their next bills.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'd say that faxes are a disappearing technology. Last year I finally stopped maintaining a dedicated fax line. It had reached the point where I was receiving several junk faxes each week, and only one or two legitimate faxes each month.
Between e-mail and PDF it just wasn't cost effective anymore.
I now use the fax machine for outgoing once or twice a month, and if I really need to receive we just arrange a time when I'm sitting next to the machine and trigger it manually.
I'd agree though that if you're one of those businesses that still has to receive lots of faxes (and there are better technologies now days) then the PC based solution makes sense.
Can you even buy Winfax any more??
Three Squirrels
What's a FAX?
How do you know the submitter is not a competitor or otherwise has malicious intent? Let the law handle it, don't do the same thing you're accusing them of doing. What's the difference between you? Intention means nothing when the actions are the same.
My fax machine is only turned on when I'm sending a fax. If somebody wants to send me something they must do it through email.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Nice idea, but it never happened... i defy you to find a usable fax number on any of the junk faxes you receive.
:)
Another story in a similar vein is slapping those business-reply-by-mail envelopes on a brick -- recepient pays ALL necessary postage.
My favorite technique is to respond with a "Do not call" fax, but make it white text on a black background. It will use up a lot of their toner and it gets the point across.
Reason is its big brother.
Does anyone have any good advice on what to do if you get junk faxes and don't even have a fax machine? Apparently my home phone number was once a business's fax line, and we periodically get what must be junk faxes at odd hours of the night. How do we deal with this crap if we don't own any fax machine (or even a modem) to waste time reading the messages and contacting the fake unsubscribe numbers that won't do any good anyways?
here in Germany there is an easy option. Phone calls are cheaper during the night, so just use a time to switch the fax of between 22:00 and 06:00... no spam faxes left.
Mostly, there are no alternatives other than something like changing your fax number or turning off the ability to receive faxes.
If you can live with not getting purchase orders and the like faxed in, you can just turn it off. Email isn't a solution - it is unreliable. What is the difference between a company using email and a spammer, anyway?
Legally, you would think that someone would be able to stop a business from sending illegal faxes. The problem is that you, as the recipient can sue but the police can't just step in an arrest and fine them. So to really make them stop you would need to get a large number of recipients together. A law firm was trying to collect on junk faxes this way years ago until they realized nobody was spending the time to follow through.
Yes, junk faxes cost you money. Suing the sender will cost more time and more money. So much so that it is a better deal for most people to just eat the cost and ignore it.
Find whoever is sending them and go kill them. Messily. Publically.
You'll go to jail for a long time, but the chilling effect it has on the rest of the spammers out there will make you a fricking hero to the rest of us.
(if you're lucky, "the rest of us" includes your parole board. If you're super extra lucky it includes your jury!)
#include - this is Funny not Informative ok mods. Sheesh.
The following product works like a charm for me at home with junk calls:
http://www.privacycorps.com/products/
I'm surprised that more companies don't sell things like this. If it were cheaper and sold in box stores everyone would probably have one. It's a little pricy, but I love the results.
The company I used to work for had a spare laptop with a fax/modem on it. It stored the faxes in a shared directory where everyone could get at them. People deleted the spam and printed the ones they wanted if they actually wanted a printout. We set the fax/modem to answer after fewer rings than the fax machine would, so in case the laptop crashed or something, the fax machine would be the fallback.
Junk faxes here really slowed down after coverage of the enforcement of junk fax legislation started to hit the mainstream media. I guess that was in the late 90s sometime. We still get a few from time to time. Although now that I think of it, this decrease also probably coincided with an increase in spam, which probably has more to do with it (cheaper, easier, wider base of victims).
:) There are four major benefits to software faxing: 1) You'll save money because there are no consumables to buy, and because of this the cost of receiving a junk fax is the same as receiving a junk email as long as you don't pay per minute on your phone line. 2) Routing faxes through email is much more effective than tossing paper into a physical inbox, especially if you have to make copies of faxes for multiple people. 3) Many fax servers will enable your employees to send a fax by simply printing to a special fax printer on their computer, saving time, money, etc. 4) The quality of received faxes, and especially outgoing faxes, is considerably improved.
Here's a wikipedia page with information about what can be done legally against junk fax senders in the US, if it's bad enough that you want to take the time to go after them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_fax
The solution, although not so much a solution as a better system, is to use fax server software or an online fax service. I run a local fax server here. Faxes come in and are routed via email to the secretary who was at one time responsible for pulling paper faxes off the old fax machine. This person then routes the fax to the appropriate person, and acts as a junk fax filter
I do sympathize with you. Especially if you're working with a lot of international companies (assuming you're in the US, if not sorry), sometimes you simply have to be able to accept faxed documents to keep customers happy. You might encourage them to start using email, perhaps by pointing out the financial benefits. Also, a lot of people might not know about simple tools like pdfcreator with which they can print and send a purchase order via email right from their existing accounting software.
I do object to your comment implying that junk email doesn't cost anything. Perhaps if you're working for a small outfit with hosted email it doesn't appear to cost anything. My mail server here processes a hundred thousand spam messages per month, and we're a pretty small outfit. This definitely costs real money in terms of hardware and software support, and most importantly employee time (I guarantee that people spend more time going through their junk email or flagging email as junk than they do looking at junk faxes).
Faxes are official legal copies of documents. Email attachments are not.
Anyone who has to send a signed or legal documents quickly - a fax is the only option unless you send it via courier.
Writefax or similar software on a PC will accept any faxes - then you can view them from any workstation, delete the junk and print the good ones. It doesn't even have to be a modern PC... any old Pentium 3 with a relative small amount of ram and storage will trump any modern fax machine.
And even a bonus, this gives you a digital copy for easy archival to network backup, tape, optical media, or removable thumb drive.
Seriously a fax machine is really only useful for sending faxes now a days.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
I used to have my fax number on my business's webpage (along with the other address information and whatnot). I started receiving a ridiculous number of junk faxes. I then took my fax number off of my webpage and about a year later (i.e. now) I receive maybe one junk fax every two months.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
just sawing a limb off? :-)
It should reduce sentence times but still have the same chilling effect.
Sometimes I need to send a document that I only have on paper, a signed contract, a copy of my photo ID, etc.
Sure, fax machines are annoying. But it's nothing compared to firing up a scanner, previewing and setting it up to capture the right area, exporting to a PDF or other common format, attaching to an email, and hoping it doesn't get canned by their mail server's file size limit or attachment-blocking policies. And why spend 15 bucks to overnight a letter when it can be sent in 2 minutes for the cost of a phone call?
Sure, email is superior in many ways, but fax machines will still be convenient and relevant until we all work in paperless offices. In other words, pretty much forever. Telling people to avoid junk faxes by getting rid of them altogether is about as helpful as telling someone to get rid of their phone if they are bothered by telemarketers.
Anyway, we use a PC w/ a fax modem to receive faxes where I work. Deleting junk faxes is just as easy as deleting junk emails.
There was a change in the law here in the UK in the Civil Procedure Rules 1998 meaning that emails and electronic carriers with docs on could be accepted in certain circumstances by courts and tribunals (etc.). I think however that they can still specify fax as being the only allowed electronic mode of communicating a document.
Which means that there are circumstances in which you are wrong.
Indeed certain places like UKIPO request email in preference for eg post-grant amendments.
FWIW.
I am not disagreeing with your assertion that, currently, faxes seem to have some legal standing.
But do people not realize how easily they can be forged and spoofed? The facsimile machine is technology from the 80's that has no authentication mechanism. It would be so easily spoofed with a fax modem! You could set up a fax that would seemingly come from, say, the office of the CEO, with letterhead and fax header to correspond, and even a signature would be a simple matter to attach.
Not long after Win2k came out, there was some situation where I had to send some fax with my signature on it to some company --something about giving written notice to my cable company that I really did want to stop my cable service, or something like that --I can't remember now. But I had no fax machine, just a digital camera. So I signed a blank sheet of paper, photographed my signature, pulled the photo into the computer and posterized it into some 4-bit grayscale with GIMP, stuck it into some OpenOffice.org letter, and then printed it to fax via Win2k. It worked, and after that I kept the PNG image of my signature around in case I had to use it for something similar.
Does that still work? It's so easy to manipulate a digital image of people's signature nowadays. The signatures of some corporate executives are even freely distributed! You get junk mail saying, "Dear [insert your own name here]: I am writing to personally tell you how much we value you as a customer, [bla bla] signed Joseph L. Presidente, CEO, Fortune 500 Company" followed by their frigg'n signature. How hard is that to cut&paste into some fax to some hotel saying, "To Whom It May Concern: I verify that I, Joseph L. Presidente, have agreed to pay all accommodation expenses incurred by [insert your name here] during his stay," or something similar.
The facsimile is a valuable tool, but the authority which people attach to them is misplaced. People need to get a clue about digital signatures, or deal with being a victim of social engineering.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Well, if (1) it's illegal to send them, and (2) they add your number to all the junk faxing lists when you call to add your number to their "don't fax" lists, why not call the do-not-fax number and add all of the telephone and fax numbers you can find for the FBI, Department of Justice, FCC, IRS, state and local law enforcement, and any other appropriate government offices you can think of. The junkfaxers should find themselves nuked, folded, spindled, mutilated, shredded, stapled, and then jailed, within a couple of months.
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 was not designed to prevent spam (although it's being used that way now). It was designed to stop junk faxes and it really works! Use it! Here's some good info.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
One of the people in my neighborhood makes a living suing telephone-spammers. There are some tricks to actually getting a judge to rule in your favor - even when the company has clearly violated the law - but once you know them, it works well. And many don't even bother going to court, they simply send her a $500 check.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
You can't make a blanket statement like that about the law. In the U.S. alone, we have a minimum of 51 separate jurisdictions applying 51 different laws. If one is outside the U.S. then the jurisdiction again make a difference.
So far as I know, in Ohio and in the 6th Federal Circuit, faxes are no better or worse than any other copy of a document, including an email attachment of it. If one is filing a document, then it can only be done electronically in the Federal Disctrict Courts in this Circuit. They will not accept faxes.
Lots of pithy comments in this thread, but here is something that will actually work; 1)Get rid of you physical fax machine 2)Get an efax account I've been using them for about 8 years now I guess, and I've yet to receive even a single junk fax. They must do some pretty hefty filtering on their end. Faxes come as email attachments which is convenient for filing, forwarding and later retrieval. It is cheaper than maintaining a fax line and machine too.
How slow can you set a fax modem to receive? 1 bit per second sounds good... just trash the incoming faxes.
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice; rather, it is an account of my layman's perception of how things have worked.
It's very simple.
Unless they have prior express permission (or, thanks to a new enabling law, an "established business relationship" with many additional qualifiers), unsolicited faxes are categorically prohibited in the US. Penalty? $500, per advertisement, statutory damages, plus possible penalties.
So sue.
Call them up, find out who it is and what they're selling. Tape the call if that's legal in your area. Then sue.
My share, after attorney's fees and costs (including copying, etc.), of my junk fax litigation has been about $38,000 over the last few years. Mostly mortgage brokers, many of whom are predatory lenders as well. Do not waste your time trying to identify "Mortgage Services" -- just get them to hand you to a local mortgage company, and sue the mortgage company. Generally, in my experience, a given 800 number is affiliated with a single customer, so you call the number, and then sue for all the faxes you've gotten with that number on them.
I write about this stuff some in my blog. Largest total settlement was with Allied Telesyn, who paid $250 per ad to all the people who filled out claim forms, $5k to me, and probably more like $300k to some lawyers. Largest settlements for me personally have been on the order of $10k, but my friendly neighborhood lawyer gets about 35%, and there's filing fees and such.
Just a few things to know:
1. Junk faxers are dishonest. They will lie. They will tell you they didn't know it was illegal, they will lie to you about the law, they will say they didn't send the faxes, and so on. We see this all the time.
2. If you are not comfortable representing yourself pro se, get a lawyer.
3. Don't go to small claims unless you are absolutely SURE that your state won't let you do district court. Small claims judges are often unfamiliar with statutory damage laws.
There are no damages to prove; the law sets the damages at $500, per advertisement.
If you want to call remove numbers, go ahead, and write down which ones you called and when, but don't expect it to have any effect.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Simply remove the paper from the fax. This then means the fax can't be delivered. We do that too and if someone wants to fax us, they have to call us and we put paper in the fax, we receive the fax and the rest of the paper is removed again. You can also simply unplug the fax and only plug it in when you want to use it.
Though if I could, I would remove the fax altogether. Receiving faxes is rare these days...
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Install a rudimentary spam filter, as found in Gmail and Firefox. First, lose the FAX machine.
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
I have to second those who are recommending a computer/software solution. I happen to enjoy Macs these days, so I'll describe just how simple it is to set this up in Mac OS X.
1. Open the Apple menu, go to System Preferences.
2. Open the Print & Fax preference pane.
3. Go to the "Faxing" tab.
4. Check the box "Receive faxes on this computer".
5. Fill in your fax number, set the number of rings before answering (depends on how you use the line)
6. Choose any or all of the available receiving options:
a. Save the fax as a PDF file to a folder you designate (if it's a shared folder anyone on the network can monitor incoming faxes)
b. Email the fax to an address you designate
c. Print the fax to any printer the Mac is set up to print to (local or network printer, either will work)
7. Optionally, go to the "Sharing" tab and turn on printer sharing, then choose "Let others send faxes through this computer". This makes the fax modem available as a shared "printer" to any other Mac on the network, or any Windows XP computer with Apple's "Bonjour for Windows" package installed.
If you're keeping your regular fax machine on the same line, set it to answer manually so that it doesn't pre-empt the computer. it's not actually necessary to keep the fax machine, but it is the simplest way to send faxes when you only have a physical document. Otherwise you'll need a scanner to pull physical documents in and then "print" them to the shared fax. This distributed direct sending method is kind of a bonus though. The main feature is the ability to receive faxes without using up fax supplies.
I did this once already for a former employer, rerouting their incoming faxes to their laser printer, where printing is immensely cheaper than using up fax machine ribbon. If you have or get one of the new Intel Macs you'll also need one of the external Apple USB modems since they don't come built-in anymore. Other than that the process will be exactly the same on any Mac that is capable of running Mac OS X 10.3 or above.
If the junk faxes are coming from a legitimate number you can also file a complaint with the FCC and/or possibly take them to court and get $1500 per incident if you can prove that there was a willful and knowledgeable intent to violate the TCPA. I read about somebody who did that a few years back. Of course there is always the tried and true faxing back an endless loop of black pages, although I can't imagine a spamming company these days who would actually be using a real fax machine that would be subject to having its ribbon used up by this little prank. Alternating the black pages with a huge "TAKE MY NUMBER OFF YOUR LIST IMMEDIATELY OR WE WILL BE FORCED TO FILE A FORMAL COMPLAINT WITH THE FCC" might work even better.
it'd be nice if 90% of fax machines were a fleet of teergrube/tarpit style fax machines that could receive the data at about 8bps, requiring hours and hours to receive a single fax, tying that sender's line up the entire way ;)
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I suggested this to someone the other day : if you get an unsolicited fax, and it has the originating number on the top edge, send a reply.
... to form a loop.
Make sure it's on an extra long piece of paper, and once the leading edge feeds out of the scanner, flip it back over and sticky tape it to the bottom edge
No idea how well it would work, but it's possible you could use up quite a lot of their paper before they cut it off, maybe a whole roll if you sent it in the middle of the night.
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
It's a commercial product and a helluva lot less satisfying than what you want. You WANT to take these guys out back and shoot them once in the head, but all you can really do is get them to stop calling.
Get a telezapper or similar product. http://www.telezapper.com/
It sends a "This number is disconnected" tone. Humans ignore it. Automated fax and telemarketer systems note it and remove your number from their database. Why call something which is known to be gone?
It's cheap, and it works fairly well.
Less mess in your local alley, too, though I'd still prefer the stronger solution.
If you're sending them a paper fax then you're using the same amount of toner to print the white-on-black original.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Accidentally" send faxes to the phone numbers in their advertisement.
Deleted
Maybe I'm missing something... but wouldn't changing the phone # for your fax work too?
This works fine if you're getting faxes to your voice-line, but if you're getting junk-faxes to your business-fax line, then it's going to disconnect legit callers as well as fax-spammers
Why support them on outdated and pointless technology like faxes?
Show me the $199 freestanding fax-to-PDF-e-mail gateway. Seriously, I have an AIO Brother that has all of the necessary parts inside, but there's no software stack to do it. I know HP has several nice units in the $1500+ range. $50 bonus for hooking up to an LDAP directory.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The ones we want we print out, the spam you can just delete.
People are way more expensive than paper.
(Not that I'm advocating printing faxes on people).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
As a recipient of junk faxes, you do have some recourse, but it usually isn't worth the effort. It usually boils down to how much time you want to spend on teaching someone a lesson. You will rarely, if ever, recover your time in terms of monetary value by taking the entity or person(s) to court. Nevertheless, should you choose to do so, the following State (California) and Federal statutes apply: Title 47 227(b)(1)(C)(II) California Business & Professions Code 17538.43(b)(2) You can make $500, up to $1,500 if the damages are trebled.
IANAL but At least in some states of the U.S. the practice of sending someone something that they do not want and then demanding payment or otherwize extracting use has been banned. This has been extended to making it possible for you to use junk faxxers on the grounds that they are using your fax. Probably this would be time consuming for any one person but if the laws of your place of residence allow it a class action lawsuit might be doable, even government funded.
Asterisk + RxFAX and TxFAX. I wrote a script that will send X amt. of total black pages to any number i choose, just in case i ever have to deal with this.
Use a computer to accept your faxes. I wasn't aware that people actually still used real fax machines?
Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!