We have gotten between 1-5 junk faxes every day on our business line, which is also our main phone line. I normally overlook these as a minor nuisance, but recently they’ve been getting out of hand. The other night, the faxer called at 10:15 p.m., and last night at 11:45 p.m.!!! We were all asleep at the time and I thought it was a family member with some emergency, that’s how unusual a call that late is around our house. Now that pissed me off.
Okay, we’re on the federal and state do-not-call lists. Apparently, this still hasn’t deterred the “$99 Florida Vacation!!!” faxers one bit. I’ve seen that each fax states that you can stop the faxes by calling a certain phone number, but they are all different, which means I would make a phone call per each fax and still continue to get the darned things. What else can we do?? Is there a do-not-fax list??? Any ideas would be appreciated.
What I’ve been doing is calling the number (not the remove number) and telling them that they are faxing a VOICE LINE and could they please take the number off the list. I sometimes explain that we had to have the phone company put a trace on the line (which is true when we were having lots of problems with faxes coming in on our voice line). But then I’ll embelish either telling them that we borrowed a fax maching from the police to figure out who it’s been or that we had to have the police get the numbers from the phone company so that we could pursue it. Either way, telling them it’s a voice line their faxing to usually helps. And recently I’ve been reporting all junk faxes to the FCC. They won’t investigate individual reports, but from the sounds of it, after the get enough complaints about one company, then they will do something about it. Here’s the FCC complaint form..
Oh, and if you have multiple lines, as we do, I always call from the number the fax came in on, I’d hate to give them another number to send a fax to. There’s a couple of times where I’ve gotten a fax beep on a voice line, quickly hooked it up to the fax machine, recieved the fax, and two minutes later received the same fax on a fax machine. I’d hate to give them a third number.
Your fax machine may or may not have a blacklist function, whereby you can bar certain numbers from calling. If you’ve got some really stupid guys who don’t know what they’re doing, their station ID will appear on the top with the number it came from, but in hundreds of faxes, I’ve only gotten one number…
There are services that claim to work toward eliminating fax spam, as it were, where you fax to them your junk faxes and they give you some cash for your trouble. Of course, they also probably sell the saturation reports back to the companies in question…
I work for a company that sends out broadcast faxes on a regular basis and if you simply send the fax back to the number on the document saying “DO NOT FAX THIS NUMBER 888-555-1212” they are required by law to remove you. PLEASE make sure you include the fax number you want removed, some people just send the fax back saying “do not fax” and we have no way to track it to see who the heck you are, especially if there’s no personalization on the document.
Sending junk faxes is a violation of Federal law. This page tells how to take action. This law, BTW, predated the do-not-call list law by several years. The sender is liable for some rather hefty fines.
What they are doing is most likely a violation of federal law at least in the US. Other folks have provided links, it’s been the law of the land for over 10 years.
I’ve had to deal with this before and here’s some of the gotcha’s:
If they can claim any kind of pre-exisiting business relationship with you (you ordered something from them, ever) then they can fax you.
They send stuff from outside of the US (hard to sic the law on 'em).
The “Take me off your list” fax number is probably for a Canadian company (see #2), they’ve started to do this lately.
They’ll claim that you signed up for their list. Fax.com did this when I tracked them down and complained. I told them to remove my number and they sent me a letter stating that they had removed the number that I had previously signed up with them. Jerks.
There will be minimal identifiable info on the fax - no mailing address, nobody’s name, just a 1-800 number going to a voicemail box. Try looking up the number (or complaining to the phone company) and notify the A.G. of the state that they do business in.
The offenders won’t get back to you if you complain.
Basically they cheerfully violate federal law, hide behind dummy “fronts” outside of the US and ignore any complaints.
So what you should do is send a copy of everything to the FCC. I was able to track down who owned many of the phone numbers (until the companies started switching to the Canadian “take me off your damn list” company) and the vast majority were from Fax.com. Shortly after I complained, Fax.com got hit with a $5.4 million fine, so persistence does pay off. Note that the advertiser themself, not just the person/group sending the fax, is also liable, and there are statutory damages ($500 per offense with triple damages if they knowingly violated the law).
It’s a PITA, requires a lot of persistence but you can get them to slow down if you are dogged enough. Good luck!
Thanks, everyone, for all your suggestions! I’m going to try the FCC complaint method (although it sounds as if they have a lot of loopholes). I appreciate your help! Any ideas will be appreciated and probably tried!
Something I’ve always wondered about this, is if it’s a good idea to call the removal line and have your number taken off the list. I always assumed that just tells them it’s a ‘live number’ just like with spam. Lately I’ve been filing an FCC complain on EVERY junk fax that comes in (3 today so far), and will only bother with any sort of removal attemt if I can actually talk to a person.
Hm, haven’t heard of those folks but given that the statutory damages are $500/$1500 per fax (for intentional or egregious violations) and you can file it yourself in small claims court, might be worth the filing fee to try it on your own.
That’s true, but I figure I get 5 or so a day (three sitting right in front of me), it’d sure be a lot easier to let someone else do the legwork. Has anyone else ever dealt with them?
I haven’t used his “faxwars” program/service/whatever, but I listen to his (Tom Martino’s) radio show pretty regularly. He is a consumer advocate and his show airs from Colorado, I think.
I’ve sent them probably 200 junk faxes over the past six months and I have yet to receive one thin dime. According to that website the response was overwhelming and it’s taking them longer to process all the faxes than they originally thought. Whatever. Even if I never see a dime, at least I’ve felt better by sending those faxes thinking that I might someday get paid for it. YMMV.
About two months ago, I decided to start calling the removal number. The place where I work would get, on average, 3-5 junk faxes per day. So, I started calling the 1-866 remove numbers, and low and behold, after about two weeks, we were down to 3-5 faxes per week. By staying on top of those, I have reduced it further. In the past two weeks, I have recieved 2 or 3 junkers. The only trouble in that time was on local company that claimed to have done business with us (which would be unpossible, given what we do and they do, and they just made up a contact name for our end). There wasn’t a number to remove our number, but they did have an e-mail to contact them for ordering their craputers. So, I e-mailed that after both faxes, indicating that I knew this was illegal and giving links to whatever agency is in charge of enforcing these thingies. haven’t seen one since.
So, to make a long story short, call the numbers. It’s quick, easy, free, and does work.
