UPDATE! This wasn't any ordinary junk-faxing incident. Find out what really happened here.
I really, truly don't have time for a blog post right now, but I wanted to get this out there right away.
Every once in a while, my phone starts ringing. A lot. Every few minutes, all day long. It's a fax machine from Nova Scotia that just won't give up.
It's been a long time - maybe as long as a year - since I'd last heard from these people. I had forgotten all about them, or thought they'd forgotten about me, when I got a cheap fax machine recently.
I set up the machine so that it doesn't accept a fax unless I specifically tell it to; nobody should be sending me a fax unless we've talked about it and I'm waiting for it.
So, receiving unwanted faxes is not the problem.
The problem used to be that I just didn't like having my phone ring off the hook for hours at a time.
Now I've got a bigger problem - I'm working at home, and I use a VPN connection to transfer files. Some of these file transfers take more than a few minutes. Normally, there is no problem. But my Internet service is DSL, and while DSL is fine for most things, my VPN connection is quite fragile, and if the phone so much as rings my VPN gets dropped.
So, the phone calls from Nova Scotia started again today. Phone rang for a while and stopped. A few minutes later, it happened again and my VPN got dropped; I had been just about to start a big file transfer.
The number on my caller ID says:
902-837-7466
A google search on this number revealed absolutely nothing. Not even other bloggers complaining about it. So I wrote up a little fax of my own and dialed the number. Guess what? The number is supposedly disconnected.
I say "supposedly" because anyone can create an outgoing message that sounds like a disconnection notice. Of course it's just as likely that they're lying about their caller ID number - it can be done. Either way, what this tells me is that these people know they're sending illegal faxes.
I asked the phone company what I could do, and their answer boiled down to "dunno, sux to be you I guess." Thanks, Verizon!
But I also found these people. You send them your unwanted faxes, and they go after the faxers. If they win money, they send you a cut. It doesn't cost you anything.
So now I'm waiting for that phone to ring again, so I can receive the fax and pass it on to someone who knows what to do with it.
I'm surprised it's taking so long. Maybe when they get a phone call at their "disconnected" number, it's their signal that they've pissed someone off.
Later the same day: Foo. I just realized that if they're in Nova Scotia, they're probably not subject to US law.
Wonder if *69 would work for calling them back?
ReplyDeleteI keep waiting for the phone companies to allow you to set up blacklists or whitelists. Wouldn't that be a valuable service worth paying a few extra bucks a month for? If you are not on my whitelist, you get sent to either an automated recording that says "go away, I don't know you" or to voice mail.
I expect that *69 would work exactly the same way that using the caller ID number would, because I think the phone # info for *69 comes from the same place.
ReplyDeleteBut the calls stopped coming (for the time being... until next time they feel like sending faxes). I let the answering machine pick up the second time they called, and their fax machine dutifully booped and blurped into it until I managed to disconnect the call. That seemed to satisfy the fax machine.
Next time it calls, I'm going to accept the fax (at least a few pages) and send it to those fax buster people. Just for the heck of it. Assuming the caller ID number is fake, there's no reason to assume that they're not really in the US and subject to US law.
After that, I'll let the answering machine take over again, since that seems to temporarily stop the calls with minimal inconvenience to me.