Fax Attacks

Reader JSM passes along an interesting piece from Forbes about the mini-industry devoted to suing fax-spammers.

Comments

[richard]

Why go after Fax.com? Why not go after the people who pay for the unsolicited faxes...Merrill Lynch, Mail Boxes Etc., and UPS. One shouldn't just punish the messenger, but also the person who wanted the messenge sent...ala vicarious liability. This is similar to spammers. Why go after someone with no assets living in Burundi when the people who contract them live here in the US and have the wherewithall to pay the fines. If the demand for third-party spammers and fax spammers is slowed by making the party who wants the advertisement liable, spam would be a non-issue...fax, email, or even telemarketing.

If I could go after AT&T when a third-party telemarketer violates the do-not call list...well, you get the picture.

[Jeff Smith]

I did not understand the relation of Dane's
story to the main point of the discussion.

I can think of two interpretations of his
story:

1) The judge made the wrong judgement in holding
him liable for faxes that were clearly not
unsolicited. In that case, the judge is a
jerk but that says nothing about the pros and
cons of the law.

2) The law does not correctly distinguish
between solicited and unsolicited faxes.
In this case, the law should be fixed, but
again this does not address the main point
of the discussion.

Did I miss something?

Jeff

[B.P.]

What is this "fax machine" that everyone is talking about?

[Peter Seebach]

There are no unintended consequences here; sending faxes without express permission is unlawful. People who break laws sometimes get punished.

It looks fine to me.

[dragoon]

Wonder how much Forbes got from Fax.com for this story? Perhaps not, but Forbes does trade coverage for cash. If not, they certainly got remarkably nice coverage for a group of thieves. Sloppy thieves at that - 1634 faxes? That's a lot of wasted paper and ink.

[yelowd]

Dane-
How well did the "chuckle" part work? I was thinking of working something like that into the advertisement. Stay with a consistent theme, get people to recognize it with the name of my company.

Having worked mostly in phone sales in business and politics, I have to laugh. telemarketing and fax blasting is not going to go away. It works. Both things that I do are proof of that. While there might be a few people PO'd about the activity (like those on this H&R), it is very profitable and a lot of people will still give money over the phone and a lot of people will respond to a blast fax if it's something they want.

Out of curiousity, if you telemarket first, asking for permission to fax information over, does that count as gaining permission?

[Skeptikos]

OK. I personally have always been offended by Fax.com. It's a little like being car-jacked. Besides, they once got a hold of one of my desk numbers, called it about 40 times in a two week period, if they weren't harassing me, I don't know what they were doing.

Notice however, that even with the fines, there are reports that they are still in business. I would not compare them to Jehovah Witness's, but I would compare them to the raccoons that got into my attic last year. It seems to me, these suits, this "mini-industry" is the ultimate freemarket answer to the problem.

I understand soliciting, but I can't understand this, and I would rather have the lawsuits go forward than have the feds deal with it, and like the office that got 1,634 in one week, it clearly is something that needs to be dealt with. Have you paid for your own fax ink and paper lately? Why should I contribute to their sales pitch? It's not like phone solicitations, where they pay for the call. So I assert, if you really believe in the free market, then you have to support these suits, or we can have the feds take care of it for us. Personally, I think the suits are a better idea. And although this may be related to the spam e-mail issue, it is a tenuous relation at best.

[TWC]

I despise junk faxes more even than junk email. Although I have never received 1634 junk faxes in a week I have received enough to piss me off.

I'm ambivalent about the lawsuits though. And, pragmatically speaking, as is the case with the spam problem, they won't work. The fax spammers will simply move offshore where US law is ineffective.

Best solution? I have fax software that I can set up to automatically delete faxes with no CSID, which is the case with most junk faxes I receive. If there is no telephone number the fax gets dumped into oblivion and I never see it. Of course, that also filters out a legit fax every so often. Not to mention that fax software eliminates the need for ink and paper and also allows me to save faxes as .PDF files on my computer. Yes been doing that for years (lookit me).

[yelowd]

Blast faxing is excellent for certain businesses. As a very small, side business owner I can say that the only way we have gotten customers is by faxing advertisements to mortgage / title companies. And yes, we tried telemarketing. For some reason it just doesn't work for our biz. We only do it about once a month, but it works great. And no one has ever called us to be taken off of our list.

[yelowd]

I'd also say that if we were fined those amounts per fax, we'd be screwed. Hopefully, the scorp would distance my personal holdings enough from the business-which owns nothing.

[Dane Carlson]

I was never a spammer, but I used to run a advertising supported newsletter of humor and inspirational stories that was faxed to local business five days a week. Each newsletter was one page long, and faxed in the dead of the night.

Everyone we faxed the newsletter too subscribed by placing their business card in one of our card bowls placed at restaurants around town. We didn't offer a prize or anything else with the subscription, so we weren't tricking anyone into anything.

At the bottom on the newsletter were unsubscribe instructions: write unsubscribe on this newsletter and fax it back.

Everyday we'd get unsubscribe requests, and everyday we'd process them. Many times someone would call from a business and unsubscribe one day, and then a couple days later a receptionist or something who sat near the fax machine and depended upon us for her daily chuckle would call wondering what happened to us, and we'd resubscribe them. Then, a week or two later someone from the business call and unsubscribe again, ad nasuem.

One day, without any notice, I was sued in small claims court by a local attorney who claimed that I was sending him unsolicited faxes, and as such owed him $500 for each of three faxes that he'd received unsolicited from me. The faxes weren't unsolicitied, and I had recorded in my files that someone from his office had called in to request the fax. Also in the files were notes detailing that someone had canceled, then restarted, then canceled the subscription over the course of a week and a half.

I took this information with me to court, but the judge explained that unfortunately his hands were tied and he was bound by the statute that required that I pay $500 for each of the three faxes -- no matter what the opinion of the court might have been about the excessiveness of the award.

That night, I removed every attorney and legal aide off the list, and within a year I totally ceased operation.