For about three weeks I have been receiving phone calls several times a day from a fax machine. I don’t have a fax machine but it seems that my phone number is stuck in the assaulting machine’s redialer system.
The solutions I have devised so far don’t really work for me:
Buy a fax machine and see what the almighty important document is.
Change my phone number
Subscribe to caller ID, get the offending number and block the number (I think there is also a charge for this service). *69 does not work
Is there a good free solution to make it stop? Thanks.
No suggestion but if you find a good one, let me know too. I just got a new phone number and a have a computer or a fax machine that is obsessed with me too. It loves to call ibn the middle of the night and around dinner so I am not too pleased.
Call the business office of your phone company or the non-emergency number of your police department and ask about the procedure for dealing with annoying calls.
You usually will have to use call-trace (yes there’s a small charge each time you use it, but no subscription fee). When an annoying call comes in you wil type *57 or whatever. The callers number will saved but you won’t get it. The police will have to get it. You will probably need to trace 4 or 5 of theses calls to prove it’s a repeated problem. The cops take it from there.
My solution for this has been to use star-69. This way, you’ll find out the fax #. Jot down a lovely polite note to the effect that the sender is faxing to a telephone #, go to a fax machine (even if you don’t own one you can go to Kinko’s/Office Depot) and fax the note to the aforementioned number. This works for me!
There are a couple of possible sources for this problem. First, someone could have the wrong fax number written down or programmed for someone they fax a lot. That is, all the faxes could be coming from one place. If this is the case, then tracing the calls might be effective because you could notify the individual at fault.
Another possible cause, some company may have published something with an incorrect fax number. In this case, tracing the calls may not help because they’d coming from different fax machines, but if you can find out who the faxes are trying to reach, you might notify them to clear up the confusion.
If this happened to me and I didn’t have a fax machine, I’d set up the free fax software on my computer/modem and set it to receive incoming faxes. This might be a pain on your voice line, but if you can do this now and then when you don’t need the line, you could trap a few faxes and see whether they’re all originating from or being sent to the same organization. Given that, you can correct the problem.
Welcome to the SDMB, zber! Do you have a computer that you could hook up to the line that the calls are coming in on? If so, you might be able to get some fax-receiving software to receive the fax it’s trying to send and figure out where it’s coming from. I don’t know if there’s free fax software you could download or not, but a lot of modems come with a program for that.
Could there possibly be legal problem if you hooked up a fax machine or used your computer and “intercepted” a fax document that wasn’t intended for you even if the fax sender screwed up by dialing the wrong number?
Just curious–I mean, what if you were recieving confidential information or something? IANAL, but I’d guess it’d only be a problem if you failed to take reasonable measures to notify the sender that they’ve got the wrong number.
*69 may not work because the number is ‘private’ (does not display on caller id bacause the customer has it blocked) or unavailable ( Caller id is not compatable with the number).
If it is private, you can’t *69 it but you can block it (another * code). If you chose to block it all private calls will not go through - they will get a message stating they will have to enter a code to allow their number to be displayed on caller id.
Even though you don’t have caller id once a number is unblocked you can *69 it.
Other then that get your computer fax-modem to answer.
I always talk to the fax machine in hopes that the sender has the volume on their speaker turned up and will eventually realize that I can’t speak faxese.
On another note, as a regular faxer I am in the habit of checking my fax confirmations to verify that my documents are being received. Anyone who repetetively and incorrectly calls your home phone number must not really care if the fax is reaching its intended destination. Fax spam???
very much so. Many use some sort of automated fax sending and are not there when it goes out.
btw
Fax spam as you put it is illegal the 1st time it is sent - no warning has to be given to the offending company and they are liable for $500 for an unauthorized fax. - but you have to take them to small claims court to get it.
Right after it calls you and you’ve hung up on it, pick up and dial *60. That’ll access the “call blocker” menu. Listen to the instructions. One of the options is to block the last number that called yours.
And don’t ask me if your local company charges for this service, because I dunno.
If you are lucky all the calls are from the same person. There was recently an ad in newspapers and on the web saying to fax resumes to my phone number. I just shut off the ringer on my phone until the calls stopped a few weeks later.
It is also possible that this isn’t a fax calling you - some auto-information systems use a protocol called IXO to send text info to alphanumeric pagers and other computer sytetms and the datatone sounds like a fax. Someone fat fingered in a bad number into the one we have at work and some poor person was getting minute to minute IXO text updates on the status of some company’s computer network - she was going absolutely apeshit by the time she ran down the owner of the phone number (which is only used by our IXO dispatcher, when she called it, she just got the datatone…)
This has been in other threads. If they send it to you, basically it’s yours. If you’re really worried about legal implications, do not transfer the information sent to you to a third party or act on it yourself.
ARGH! I was getting calls like this at 5 a.m., one after the other. It’ was obviously programmed to keep trying 5 times to get through before giving up. We had a new baby in the house and sleep was precious. I was NOT PLEASED.
I called the phone company who couldn’t help much but were able to tell me what phone number had been calling me. I then went online and found a reverse phone directory and attempted to locate the company which “owned” the fax. Then I used that name to look up a phone number (not a fax number) and called them. They said there was no fax machine in that office, so that was a dead end. But I still had the fax number, even if I didn’t know who owned it. So I waited until later in the day and sent a fax to the number from my office fax. At that point, I was so incredibly pissed off, I just sent a “bait” fax asking them to call me (at my work number) in regards to the fax they’d sent earlier that day. Then I waited, staring at the phone, drumming my fingers, seething, just waiting for them to call so I could tell them how horrible they were. But they never did. Maybe no one ever reads the faxes.
But anyway, maybe such a tactic would be more successful for you.
- she was going absolutely apeshit by the time she ran down the owner of the phone number (which is only used by our IXO dispatcher, when she called it, she just got the datatone…)