Earlier this year, Presidential Who’s Who Inc., was fined $640,000.00 by the FCC for sending 100 junk faxes to people who did not ask for the fax information. Fax recipients of the unwanted sales information from Presidential Who’s Who filed an official junk fax complaint via the online complaint form on the FCC’s website. The FCC responded to these complaints and warned Presidential Who’s Who that this form of unsolicited fax advertisement was illegal and to stop immediately. According to the FCC web site, Presidential Who’s Who failed to respond to the FCC’s warning and now they will have to dig deep into their pockets to pay the Commission. Organizations who send unsolicited fax information to others is illegal and is covered within the Telephone and Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991, enacted by Congress.
We hear about a lot of junk fax complaints from our customers and are asked how to stop them. Unless you are a corporate enterprise, you should skip straight to the FCC Junk Fax form and fill out the page. If you are a corporate enterprise and can’t figure out who is actually sending you this fax to begin with, try forwarding your fax number into a toll free fax number that is redirected back to your fax server. When the fax call comes in from the toll free number, the carrier should provide the actual number that is sending the call to you within the ANI string. You can use this fax number to complete the FCC Junk Fax form to document the incident with the FCC. If the FCC receives enough complaints about a particular organization sending unwanted faxes, they can be fined significantly by the FCC. If organizations just spent 15 to 20 minutes a week reporting junk faxes sent to them we could significantly make a dent in reducing junk faxes.
If you are lucky enough to have a RightFax server, you can create a table containing the ANI strings that are faxing you. The table can be associated with a spam user that has his faxes set to purge every day thru fax age. When a spammer sends you a fax, the message will end up in the spam user and will be deleted every night automatically. If you need help setting up this feature of if you have an interest in talking about other advanced methods for removing spam, please contact us.
