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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?
Fax them back with a bunch of black paper taped into a loop.
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
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.
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
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.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
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.
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?
I'd say that faxes are a disappearing technology.
As much as I'd like to agree with you (because I think there are many better solutions), I can't. I work for a company that processes insurance claims and many of our claims are submitted via fax. Until about 6 months ago, they had 8 or 9 fax machines receiving the faxes, but they could barely keep up. Then, I replaced them with a couple of servers - 16 lines each - running Hylafax. On average, we're receiving 800 to 900 faxes a day, but during January and February, we were averaging around 1400.
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
Or look at the google ad under the post (I'm seeing eFax there).
We use that where I work and it's quite nice. It e-mails you when you recieve a fax and there is an application that you use to send them...you can send word documents, PDFs, or it interfaces directly with a scanner.
Unfortunately I don't know how much the service costs, it was in place before I begain working there.
We do persuade our customers and vendors to use e-mail as much as possible (sheet-feed scanners are not very expensive)...we used to have 20 numbers through eFax and have managed to remove five of them in a few months. If we had to, we could probably axe 5 more of them.
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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.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
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]
"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?"
"And get rid of your fax machine!"
That's the right answer after all.
The head says that fax is a problem for the poster because it costs him money, not like e-mail spam. That means to me he doesn't count his time as money.
I'll make the assumptions that his "fax costs" come from paper and ink and that he owns at least a PC (or else he wouldn't mention e-mail spam). Well, then the answer is easy: don't use paper and ink. There're aplenty of "fax in your computer" solutions so you will see the fax on your computer screen prior to print it (if there's still the need to print it).
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/
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.