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?

Comments

Digital Fax Modem with internal memory or ...

[Qbertino]

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.

Re:DNC

[LinuxGeek]

A friend with a couple of businesses had a fax spam problem and had requested that the worst (by far) offender please stop wasting their time and his by sending any more faxed offers. He made several more polite voice and faxed requests when they persisted in sending the faxes.

Finally, he printed out a couple of pages with large letters asking to please remove his business from their list, giving his name, fax and phone numbers. He then taped the pages together into an endless loop and faxed his request to be removed. I think he said that his fax log showed that it sent for about two hours before cutting off. Amazingly, he got no more junk faxes from that particular spammer. :)

Re:Nice urban legend

[ajs318]

No it isn't, at least not by an ordinary person. On a land line, the caller ID is sent -- from the called party's local telephone exchange -- after the line polarity reversal and before the first burst of ringing voltage. No circuit is established between caller and called party. The only way to spoof caller ID is from the called party's local exchange. If you're on ISDN and have multiple numbers, there's a message you can send down the D-channel to select one of them; but the remote exchange will actually check that the number really is assigned to you. Spoofing caller ID requires fairly high-level access, and the phone company know exactly who can do it.

However, there may be a way you can apparently spoof it, if the far-end user is sufficiently dim-witted. But it will probably only work for phones, not faxes. Like any phorm of phreaking, this one relies on telephone company greed to succeed.

The old Nynex / Cable and Wireless phone lines avoided patent issues (and coincidentally made sure their equipment would be incompatible with BT's; though manufacturers would soon see a gap for a phone with built-in caller ID display and include both systems in their phones) by using a different method of sending caller ID, which was a burst of DTMF tones between ringing voltage bursts. If someone's telephone supports such dual-mode caller ID (it'd've been labelled "BT and cable compatible"), then you can send DTMF digits from the calling end immediately after the line has been picked up and they will show on the screen.

Obviously that won't work for most people, since it's usual to look at the caller ID on the phone first, then pick it up (or let it ring, as the case may be). The called party would have to be in a hurry, or expecting a call from a known person, to pick up the phone without checking. Furthermore, you can only spoof the number that appears on the screen of the telephone, not the number you hear when you dial 1471.