Too mundane for the Pit. Apologies to Yosemete Sam for the thread topic.
At my office, we typically receive 2 or 3 spam faxxes per day, on my floor alone. Most of these get thrown out. Once in a while I’ll write one up at the FCC’s web site.
Friday we received one spam fax, advertising a vacation service. The fax claimed to be a memo from “Human Resources Department” – a common enough ploy. The fax had a convenient 800 number to call to lose money, er, buy the vacations, and another 800 number in small print to be removed from the fax list.
I was feeling a bit nasty, so I decided to write this one up. I noticed that the fax did not say what company was selling this bridge, er, service. So I did a reverse lookup of both 800 numbers, on Google and another site.
Nothing. No listing found for either number.
How exactly did the spammer expect to steal money, if their 800 numbers couldn’t even be confirmed? :dubious:
(I put into the FCC writeup a note that the phone numbers in the fax couldn’t be reverse looked up, and the fax might count as an unidentified sender, and I suggested that the FCC look into telecommunications fraud charges.)
Now, that’s irritating. Waste of paper, if nothing else.
Modern technology has frankly amazed me in terms of how smart people can be while simultaneously proving how dumb they can be. Hooking up a computer, getting connected to the internet, and so on, is NOT an easy trick. A decade ago, I’d have sworn that people smart enough to do this were certainly too bright to send a thousand bucks to Nigeria.
BTW, it’s illegal to not have a header on a fax, so you can add that to your FCC report in some cases. In fact, some fax machines have an option to block faxes without headers.
What I love is getting the five emails in a row, all of which say “i saw ur profile and i think ur cute. cum c me! Love, Rhonda!” or whatever. Let’s say that I’m a stupid, horny kid who actually falls for this. Won’t five different emails in a row, all with the same wording but different email addresses and signatures, just maybe suggest to him that this isn’t really a person?
I think these people who send out so much overkill spam are probably hurting their own cause more than they’re helping it.
I hate fax spam. Hate it. For some reason fax spammers send us five tons of fax spam a day. I mean, we recycle, but it’s still a huge waste in the first place.
And they always try to send it to MR. ACKERMAN. Well, boys, sorry to burst your bubble, but MR. ACKERMAN hasn’t worked here in damn near eleven years. He was replaced by MR. SMITH who was replaced this March by MR. GINTER. At least get it right!
I appreciate the grammar note, NurseCarmen, but who am I to correct the phrasing of the infamous Yosemete Sam?
I’ll have to pull out my tape of the Acme-thon from a few years back, and find the title of the precise cartoon where he said the original line: “Dragons is so stupid!”
Thanks, all these spam faxes have no header indicating the fax of origin. I’ll see if we can do that!