FourEyesSquad

Stephanie Zimmermann, also known as THE FIXER, of The Herald News today received a letter from one of her readers about spam faxes she gets on a regular basis.  Reading her article made me write this post because the feeling is mutual, the only difference is that mine are just about 1000% worst.

About 5 years ago while we were still using conventional fax machines, my company spends about a rim or two of paper in a week for these spam faxes.  That is correct, we receive these unsolicited ad junk faxes in a pretty regular basis .  An average of about 40 to 50 pages a day per person, then multiply that by about 200 employees during that time. 

Thanks to FAX to EMAIL technology that we employed about 4 years ago.  We now are an environmentally friendly company by not killing as much trees in a daily basis.  But not everyone have the capability to do what we did specially small businesses that are too dependent on these conventional machines. 

The Telephone Consumer Act of 1991 addressed this issue by requiring all fax machines manufactured on or after December 20, 1992 and all facsimile modem boards manufactured on or after December 13, 1995 must have the capability of identifying the following:

•  the date and time the transmission is sent;  
• the identity of the sender; and  
• the telephone number of the sender or of the sending fax machine. 

I didn’t made a typo above, it was clearly about 15 years ago when a law was enacted to address the issue of spam and we still get them today.  The loophole is that the information required is often modified by the sender and therefore defeats the whole purpose of properly identifying the sender.

According to The Fixer, My Hot Leads is one of the biggest perpetrator of these spam faxes.  This company along with others are sued in federal court for allegedly violating consumer protection laws.  So for those that can not quite transition yet from using the conventional fax machines, there are ways to minimize these junk and spam faxes by going to http://www.junkfax.org and other sites on the internet.  Just google the keyword stop junk fax. 

CPC

FourEyesSquad.com provides technical services to all types of businesses. Please contact us for details or call us at 800-406-4522.