Irritating Fax Autodialers...

[Gurm]

Well, since we moved I've been getting easily a dozen calls a day from a fax machine trying to talk to me.

Most of the time it's "unknown number", but all day today it's had a number - in Kansas.

So... anyone who has a fax machine and wants to have some fun... line up.

I've sent them one friendly warning fax. If they don't respond, or if I get any more calls, I'd like to set as many people loose on them as possible.

We'll be polite, clean, and TREMENDOUSLY wasteful of their toner.

Whaddya say?

- Gurm

[Wombat]

I say that you take two pieces of black construction paper, and tape them together to get a 8.5x22 sheet. Start to feed it through the fax machine, and once the first end rolls out, you tape the ends together in a loop. This should suck all the ink out of their fax machine.

There are computer programs that do this, too.

[UtwigMU]

Umm, did you hear about RVScom software?

Legal lite version is 12 $. It turns your computer into fax machine, saves files to disk as images and lets you review them and print those you want.

It also can serve as voice answering machine and stores messages as sound files on your HDD.

Some advertisersuse this method (I don't know which software they use for faxmailing, RVScom is more of a recipient than sender software). Fax-mailing is somewhat popular b2b advertising, as it is very cheap per sent medium.

Basically you save fax as bitmap-tiff, connect 2 modems to machine and let it churn all night long, it sends about 10.000 faxes per day.

Those who do this generally use software solutions on their end.

You basically buy WLW (google for "wer liefert was") or similar CD-ROM or visit online phonebook, collect phonenumbers of companies that have certain number of employees or some other criteria (depends to how large companies you want to market too), export to Excel and start marketing.

There are also high end software/hardware solutions (IIRC Kodak makes one), that collect all incoming faxes, store them as images on the server, automatically OCR text from them and deliver them as e-mail to appropriate employee's desktop.

Most serious companies (anything above papa-mama shop) use something more sophisticated than your basic paper and toner fax.



What kind of faxes were you receiving?

If I were you, I'd computerize my faxing. Since I don't use fax (sent 2 faxes just to test) and I'm behind ISDN line with which my old ISA US Robotics is not compatible, I haven't done this.

But basically just buy modem, RVScom software and Scanner which usually comes with decent OCR software.

Save faxes as .tiffs, import in Recognita and save as .doc.

[Wombat]

Utwig,

1) Yeah, we know. Way to kill a joke using truth :P Still, it will keep their phone line busy.

2) Unsolicited faxes like this company's are illegal in almost all states of the US.

[UtwigMU]

Then send cease and dessist letter.

Or write a page full of Italian/Mexican/Russian swear words and threats with shaky/murderous handscript. Also use insured by Mafia (You hit me, we hit you) implications.


If you choose the latter approach, the next step is calling them and asking how their kids are.
(joke)

After this step you must either get serious or back off (so I don't recommend it).

Better would be subscribing them to every catalogue, spam, penis enlargement, university diploma and other nasty such features.

[Belwarrior]

I am facing a similar problem at my work where we just moved into. We receive all the related fax at another location so we do not have any fax machine here nor do we intend to.
The problem -> We are still receiving fax at random times for the previous tenants (a travel agency).
We are using an ADSL connection for web acess so is there any fax software that can check/receive/send for fax on a xDSL line?

[agallag]

Temporarily forward your phone to the FCC spam hotline.

[az]

Belwarrior: There are Unified Messaging Services that give you an external fax (much like e-mail providers give you an e-mail address, but the server is of course at their site, not at yours), and might even connect your fax to your e-mail, sms, blackberry etc. (so you could send someone a fax from any computer that can send e-mail, or you could receive an sms whith the contents of the new fax that just arrived, or you could call them and a machine reads your new fax to you etc. - unified messaging). They would give you a new fax number though, and of course this kind of service isn't free. It's not possible to send fax over ADSL (without some kind of service as described above), but you could just connect a fax machine to your phone lines (or a modem with G3 fax support, if you want to use your PC - it's no problem to have an analog modem and ADSL on the same PC).

All clear?

AZ

[GNEP]

Friends of mine had this recently in London. BT told them that the only real way to get rid of it was to change their number, which was done for free.

As you've just moved, it might be worth it as not too many people should have to re-learn your new number.

[Gurm]

Yeah, I'm tempted to do that.

- Gurm

[Kooldino]

While you're at it, pick up a Telezapper. They work great.

[az]

A what?

AZ

[High_Jumbllama]

Originally posted by Wombat
Utwig,

1) Yeah, we know. Way to kill a joke using truth :P Still, it will keep their phone line busy.

2) Unsolicited faxes like this company's are illegal in almost all states of the US.

Well, you could fill the hard drive instead with some really large faxes. I use to do this with people's email accounts when they would not leave me alone before spammers got so inventive. They'd have 3 or so large email and dozens of full notices!

[UtwigMU]

Well you could if Bill Gates was paying for your phone bill.

A what?

Some sort of product that cancels out the nonwanted calls.

You can achieve same with ISDN, similar features to GSM.

[az]

Ah OK

Like a IP based firewall for phones

AZ