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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