Man Tells Fax Spammers To Go Fax Themselves...And They Comply

[Racehorse]

http://consumerist.com/5050925/man-tells-fax-spammers-to-go-fax-themselvesand-they-comply

Man Tells Fax Spammers To Go Fax Themselves...And They Comply

Pat is our consumer action hero of the week. He writes:

    For weeks now I have been receiving fax calls on my house line, a number I've had for over twenty years and now ported to VOIP; somehow, at some point, it got included on a telemarketing fax CD.

    I get them 3-4 times a day, each repeated 3 times, starting at 6 AM. Being awaken by the cheerful chirping of a fax when answering the phone isn't my cup of tea: Nobody calls me at six, so when it rings I always think there is some kind of emergency!

    I finally decided to do something about this problem, and using the caller ID number as starting point, Google kindly provides me with the main number and name of the offending company.

    The receptionist was not so receptive to my request: Seems they have many employees, and no interest in tracking down who is sending what, because they are very, very busy. Goodbye.

    OK. Fine by me. One great advantage of my VOIP provider (Primus, for anyone who cares) is that their base package includes many interesting features, including the possibility to redirect any number to another. Thirty seconds later, I had the fax number redirected to the receptionist's number.

    Since the redirection happens at the exchange, it will of course be a bit more difficult for them to track down the origin of these new, annoying calls than if they had been willing to listen to my complaint. They had their chance, and blew it.

    I call this forcing corporate responsibility.

Get it? Now all the fax spammers are sending faxes to the receptionist at the company that sold the guy's telephone number to them, the receptionist that said they were too busy to remove his number, using the fax machine they're too busy to remove. It's like a delicious irony cake wrapped in irony ice cream and topped with chocolate irony sprinkles! Let's see how long it takes for them to remove that number now. Congrats to you, Pat, you are our consumer action hero of the week!

I just find this all kinds of awesome. He is my new hero.

[Manedwolf]

That's better than when I replied to one with a return fax of a whole ream of black paper after hours.

I think I broke their toner.

[Boomhauer]

We get very annoying advertisments (including one for a company building custom "tactical" rifles, hehe) all the time. From adverts for cruises to sale flyers, I am very tired of unsolicited faxes.

[K Frame]

I worked at a newspaper when fax blasting was legal, common place, and continuous.

We would take a long piece of paper that we had printed black. On it we printed "DON'T FAX THIS NUMBER AGAIN" with the fax number.

We'd drop that in the fax, tape the ends together, and let it run.

The publisher of the paper got a VERY nasty phone call from one of the companies, one of the worst offenders, threatening to sue us, believe it or not. Said advertising that way was legal, but what we were doing wasn't.

OK, no problem.

We took the same, large sheet of black paper and taped our advertising rate schedule to it and looped it again.

We never heard from them again.

[Marnoot]

Unfortunately, I would guess fax-spamming companies of today use fax servers rather than actual fax machines. Thus the black-paper faxing route might not work anymore, which is a shame.  Still tempted to try it on the ones that fax spam us here at my office.

[Nick1911]

That's pure win!

[K Frame]

Unsolicited advertising of the kind that was going on in the 1980s is no longer legal. I've not seen a case of it in years.

It used to be the same companies hitting the same faxes day after day after day.

And that's when paper was that treated crap that was on rolls. Expensive as all get out.

The trick in the 1990s was printer ink and toner scams. Boiler room cold callers would random call and try to trick employees into revealing information about what printers were being used. Then they would ship a bunch of hideously over priced ink or toner via UPS collect.

I took more than my fair share of those calls when I worked at NRA. I always told them, "Hold on, let me go look!" and parked the call on hold. Our phone system was such that when they hung up, my line would release, so I didn't really care how long they held on.

Another wonder was the cold calling stock brokers. Always loved messing with them.

The ones that REALLY took the cake, and the ones that I loved sparring with?

The people who were selling the cheap ass knock off posters by artists like Dali and representing them as if they were limited edition, hand signed collector's prints. I know two people who got burned.

[Manedwolf]

Unsolicited advertising of the kind that was going on in the 1980s is no longer legal. I've not seen a case of it in years.

It used to be the same companies hitting the same faxes day after day after day.

And that's when paper was that treated crap that was on rolls. Expensive as all get out.

We get fake invoices from scammers.

[Nick1911]

Unsolicited advertising of the kind that was going on in the 1980s is no longer legal. I've not seen a case of it in years.

It used to be the same companies hitting the same faxes day after day after day.

And that's when paper was that treated crap that was on rolls. Expensive as all get out.

We get fake invoices from scammers.

Do you send them fake money?

[Marnoot]

Unsolicited advertising of the kind that was going on in the 1980s is no longer legal. I've not seen a case of it in years.

It used to be the same companies hitting the same faxes day after day after day.

And that's when paper was that treated crap that was on rolls. Expensive as all get out.

We get nothing like the volume you're talking about, but every day there's at least a few fax spams sitting in the fax machine's tray. Vacation offers trying (poorly) to look like HR memos, etc.

[K Frame]

Unsolicited advertising of the kind that was going on in the 1980s is no longer legal. I've not seen a case of it in years.

It used to be the same companies hitting the same faxes day after day after day.

And that's when paper was that treated crap that was on rolls. Expensive as all get out.

We get fake invoices from scammers.

Yeah, I've seen more than my fair share of those.

One person I know sent back a bunch of Monopoly money...

[K Frame]

Unsolicited advertising of the kind that was going on in the 1980s is no longer legal. I've not seen a case of it in years.

It used to be the same companies hitting the same faxes day after day after day.

And that's when paper was that treated crap that was on rolls. Expensive as all get out.

We get nothing like the volume you're talking about, but every day there's at least a few fax spams sitting in the fax machine's tray. Vacation offers trying (poorly) to look like HR memos, etc.

The single pagers are generally legal and generally come from the originating company.

The kind of stuff you'd see in the 1980s would be 50, 100 pages or more, each one an ad of its own. A fax house would be generating them. That was their only business; solicit advertising from companies and send it out in huge packets. It was the spam mail of its day.

That kind of bulk faxing is illegal now days. Some companies were spending thousands upon thousands of dollars in fax supplies each month because of bulk faxes.

[Firethorn]

The single pagers are generally legal and generally come from the originating company.

Actually, from what I remember of the relevant law, even the single pagers are illegal UNLESS the company has a prior business arrangement with your company, or an employee of your company that gave out his (business) fax.  It's just that the occasional single pager doesn't motivate people to go through the necessary actions.

[ArfinGreebly]

I have always had some kind of external modem.

When I started getting late night threatening phone calls aimed at my (future) wife back in the eighties, I would simply hook up the modem to the phone line, turn off the phone ringer, and let the modem answer and screech in their ear.  Within a few days, no more late night calls.

When the era of fax spam hit, I did the same thing.  If I wasn't home, the modem was hooked up.  When I went to bed, the modem became my "answering machine."

It was great.  I never had to put up with phone/fax spam for more than a week or two.

More recently, we got a phone land line through Verizon, who promptly sold our information to everyone and his dog.  We started getting calls from India via a number area-coded in Arizona.  We got calls for free trips and insurance and Wal*Mart gift cards.

No problem.  We had taken two phone lines, because we need one for the fax.  I simply swapped the fax over to line #1 and called it line #2.  The phone spam dried up in a couple of weeks (seems Verizon didn't bother selling our line #2 info).

We still get the occasional fax spam.  Maybe one a week.

I figure we're ahead of the game.

But the OP?  That dude has my admiration.

Very cool.

[280plus]

I stopped putting paper in my FAX machine. Problem solved. 

[crt360]

Way to go, consumer action hero Pat!  We get three or four unsolicited faxes a day.  They're usually for some kind of employee health plan, stock tips, or 2 day 5 night cruises to Cancun, Jamaica, Bahamas, etc.

Mike, we used to get those calls from the toner people asking what kind of printers and copiers we used.  I don't think anyone ever gave them a straight answer.  "I don't know.  I think it's a Zoltar."

[ilbob]

we no longer have a fax machine. faxes come in and are stored electronically. any spam is just deleted and never printed. faxes themselves are electronically forwarded to the appropriate party.

only drawback is there is no way to receive a fax after hours since the gals that handle this chore only work days. but we don't fax much these days. mostly email.