I love the Do Not Call list.  I signed up immediately and the level of phone solicitations has dropped off to near zero.  The primary remaining calls are my credit card companies, who call ostensibly to verify some detail of my account, and then attempt to move smoothly into a sales pitch for balance transfers, payment protection, or some other crap that I have already repeatedly turned down by tossing dozens of junk mail solicitations.

But, I am increasingly bothered by junk faxes.  There are unscrupulous marketers out there that have automated systems to call and detect fax numbers.  They send faxes to those numbers selling insurance, vacations, all kinds of junk.  It’s bad enough when these junk faxes fill up my computer’s fax inbox, but they also attempt to send them to my home phone.  At odd hours.  This morning it was two attempts at 2:45 and 3:15 AM.  I didn’t get back to sleep until almost 5.  I’m grumpy and I’m not going to take it any more!

I spent some of that time trying to figure out ways to make such marketing un-economic.  The fax itself doesn’t come with a source number, so I can’t send 1000 faxes back to the source for every one they try to send me.

Most of these junk faxes have an 800 number to call and remove yourself from the database, but this doesn’t seem to have reduced the volume any.  The automated systems on the other end seem suspiciously identical.  Trying to set up my computer to bombard the 800 number for delisting didn’t seem to work - they must have protections built in against that.

The product being hawked usually doesn’t have an 800 number either, and it’s not economic for me to invest my long distance dollars in annoying the spammer indirectly.

As fax spam is illegal, there is small claims court or class action lawsuits.  But perusing junkfax.org doesn’t give me much hope for a simple strategy to combat fax spam.  At least there are folks wielding the full weight of the legal system against this invasion of my home.