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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.