(Getty)
Pat is our consumer action hero of the week. He writes:
For weeks now I have been receiving fax calls on my house line, a number I’ve had for over twenty years and now ported to VOIP; somehow, at some point, it got included on a telemarketing fax CD.
I get them 3-4 times a day, each repeated 3 times, starting at 6 AM. Being awaken by the cheerful chirping of a fax when answering the phone isn’t my cup of tea: Nobody calls me at six, so when it rings I always think there is some kind of emergency!
I finally decided to do something about this problem, and using the caller ID number as starting point, Google kindly provides me with the main number and name of the offending company.
The receptionist was not so receptive to my request: Seems they have many employees, and no interest in tracking down who is sending what, because they are very, very busy. Goodbye.
OK. Fine by me. One great advantage of my VOIP provider (Primus, for anyone who cares) is that their base package includes many interesting features, including the possibility to redirect any number to another. Thirty seconds later, I had the fax number redirected to the receptionist’s number.
Since the redirection happens at the exchange, it will of course be a bit more difficult for them to track down the origin of these new, annoying calls than if they had been willing to listen to my complaint. They had their chance, and blew it.
I call this forcing corporate responsibility.
Get it? Now all the fax spammers are sending faxes to the receptionist at the company that bought the guy’s telephone number, the receptionist that said they were too busy to remove his number, using the fax machine they’re too busy to remove from their list. It’s like a delicious irony cake wrapped in irony ice cream and topped with chocolate irony sprinkles! Let’s see how long it takes for them to remove that number now. Congrats to you, Pat, you are our consumer action hero of the week!
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It is fundamental to the receptionists job to connect you to the party with which you are trying to reach. She failed to provide this most basic job requirement.
Sure it is mean to forward the calls to her, but she should have done her job. Keep in mind the calls have been redirected to the offending company, at the best number the victim was able to find.
I’d like to buy this guy a pint (beer)! Who cares about the receptionist, as she has free will and took the job for a company of nefarious and unscrupulous business practices (junk faxing…).
I had something similar to this happen to me when I got my Grand Central number. Apparently, whomever owned the number before me had been sent to collections, and I kept getting their bill collectors. >_<
I recently had a really bad spam fax sent to my home fax machine. all it was was a black sheet, wasted almost all my ink. also, it was at 10 something at night. I did the only logical thing at the moment, sent them back a 20 sheet fax of black construction paper.
This is THE Optimus Hadron Collider Prime! Gave me an instantenious righteous collider in seconds!
Excellent! I bet the receptionist found out which numbers were sending spam faxes.
I used to get them too and decided to cancel my land line due to the volume of calls at 2am.
I have Primus voip, and that’s a good one.
The comment above about making a ‘loop’ out of black paper with tape and faxing it endlessly is classic as well.
A few of my own fav’s:
-Here in Canada it’s illegal for collection agencies to call you on your cell. I tell them the number they have reached is my cell anyway and tell them to take it off their list. Same goes for companies and org’s that are exempt from our DoNotCall laws(The US one is much stronger with less exemptions).
-You can always tell the telemarket that the person they are trying to reach has passed away. I used to work in a call centre like 10 yrs ago – and that was enough to feel like crap enough to make sure they went on the internal do-not-call list.
-I have also heard about using pre-paid postage on junk mail for consumer revenge. Allegedly, you can tape the return envelope for a marketing offer onto a shoe-box and mail a brick back to the direct marketers office!
Love to hear more of these…
I have a colleague who did something similar. He was getting a lot of recorded “sales” calls on his home line. They were coming in several times a day from 3 or 4 numbers. So he got the numbers the recording were telling him to call and, using VOIP forwarding, forwaded the numbers to eachother. So Company A’s recorded sales calls go to Company B’s call call center, Company B’s recorded sales calls go to Company C’s call center, Company C’s recorded sales call go to ….
You get the picture.
Most phone systems have fax detection that redirects the call to a fax ext. The black page rules, ink costs a fortune but alot of bigger companys use a pc because of the junk faxes. I like the 1800 option best as it costs the offender $$.
So, these phone calls… they happen only around 6AM? That would limit the irritation factor for the secretary, I would imagine. She probably only receives it on her voicemail.
Sweet. That’s like when someone speeds by you and cuts you off on the road only to then be pulled over by the cop sitting in the BP parking lot on the other side of the street. Sweet, simple justice.
@Difdi
Not entirely true difdi since he is initiating NOTHING. they are initiating the fax he is simply redirecting there fax “back” to them Ala Return to Sender.
I’m so happy, I could poop. This is so much better than my black paper faxthrax. STREET JUSTICE MO FO!
Now if the outgoing voicemail spammers that start out with “This is the second notice that your car warranty has just expired” would only call from one number, so I could do this.
I need to find out if Vonage has this feature. If not, I’m switching!
It is incredibly unlikely that a company engaged in violating federal law by sending junk faxes is going to pursue a criminal or even civil complaint in this case. It would be amusing as hell if they tried, but it won’t happen.
While this is funny, it is very illegal and could get him is as much trouble as the company that is sending him the fax in the first place. BTW, VOIP doesn’t block your phone number, and call forwarding is done on behalf of your phone number. For those who are not aware, there are FCC regulations that make it a Federal crime to send an unsolicited fax to anyone. In some states, like CA where I am, you can sue the sender and receive $1,000 to $10,000 per instance, but you’ll need to do the leg work and document each violation.
My company is with Primus also. We have a vendor that we pay electronically. The payments always arrive before the grace period ends, but their wonderful automated system starts calling the day after the due date, and is incessant (calling 2 or 3 times a day.)
About 6 or 8 months ago, I noticed the call-forward-if-from-this-number feature, and so any time this vendor’s accounts receivable department calls, it automatically forwards the call… back to the vendor’s accounts receivable department.
I would love to listen in on one of those calls, where the person handling the outbound call gets connected to the person handling the inbound call… and see how long it takes one to figure out they are talking to one of their coworkers in the same call center.
here’s an interesting tidbit that my sister passed along to me, although it only works on the regular phone and not fax machines: You know how you get those annoying voice activated sales calls? When you hear them start their rant, just hit the # key like 7 or 8 times and it drops you name/number from the computer. My understanding is that is scambles it or something to that effect. It works wonderfully and those annoying calls have all but stopped, I use it at work, too since I do answer that phone.
My favourite anti fax-spam solution (which doesn’t work for EVERYONE, certainly not the fax-warehouses which don’t accept incoming calls) was to make a copy of the inbound fax, tape it to the bottom of the first and fax it back to the offending spammer.
Once the first page was through the machine, loop it over and tape it to the bottom of the second. Endless faxing!
I found that those individuals never faxed me again.
Thanks for the idea, which I will try. I usually just keep my fax line to not receive faxes, unless someone calls first to ask me to turn it on, but your solution may be just the ticket for me too.
Resurrected by StumbleUpon….
I’m figuring there are say… under 30 fax lines going out of such outfits as travel agents, each outfit has just one receptionist. Was going to say she’d be busier than a one armed paper hanger, but people everywhere need to do this, not just one person redirecting one fax at 6am (one fax is usually all that gets sent in one day, from my experience, usually with a few days off in the interest of appearing sincere).
Next, if the receptionist manages to block incoming calls from the guy who wrote this article, who wins – the telcos? Would the sending fax machine get telco tones for ‘no longer in service’? I’ve never called into a callblock.
OTOH, some of the sending systems are PC’s with multiple fax-modem cards, so no real paper gets printed, just a lot of stored incoming fax files, and then, storing any files are only if the sending machines are configured to answer incoming calls (not mandatory). Now, if the fax machines don’t answer incoming calls, then it is a race for the sending machine to try to get a line with a dialtone, before an incoming call starts ringing (which the fax machine can’t transmit into). Some effect, but sub optimal.
Usually, a business needs a block of numbers, e.g., xxx-6000 for switchboard, then 30 extensions would get 6001 – 6030 (various block sizes are available, you get the idea). Do a little research, there are good telephone research websites out there, and I do not refer to AnyWho or ‘yourreverselookup’ type consumer sites. When you discover the sites to which I refer (and please – do not ruin it for everyone, don’t post the urls all over the place and make them go all membership and license-y), from them you get information that says whether the number is part of a block of numbers purchased by one company, still more research – was the block purchased by a reseller? etc. Once you get the data, repeating the research can go pretty quickly after a few repetitions (some of my former employers would get 3 faxes over one night, nothing the next night, then 2, a day off, then 5 over the weekend…). Once the research is done properly…. just reset your call forward to redirect into a different number into that company every few days. Why aggravate just a receptionist/secretary? I mean, she HAS to have a boss, right? And that boss has a vp over them, and the vp has to report to the pres, the pres oversees the sales group, and the marketing group….. there is 6 desk phones right there that need to be available for uses other than faxing during their business hours.
For those really stubborn fax outfits, send them faxes from another fax outfit….
As long as YOUR telco will tolerate your changes, you’re good to go.
I wonder if there are any phreakers still about….
Fantastic! But all that irony made me hungry…