Do you engage a fax spammer?

The anti-spam legislation in New Zealand was extended to faxes on October 20—although, technically, junk faxes were disallowed under the Telecommunications Act, based on my reading, and always were.
   It hasn’t stopped one company from continuing to send junk faxes, and I’ve reported their three post-October 20 ones to the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA).
   However, an interesting one came from Faxads.biz. These folks have, by their own admission, been fax-spamming us for ‘years’. We never consented to being on their list. And now, they are saying that if we do nothing, they will deem it our consent for their continuing to spam us.
   As we’ve always operated email lists that people have to consent to by sending a request to a specific address—unlike many companies, who add you to their emailing list just because you have used their contact form—this approach is foreign to me.
   As anyone who has used email knows, the first rule of spam is never engage the spammer. This only serves to confirm that your address is current, and you will get more spam as a result.
   After reading the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007, a New Zealand junk fax must have a clear means of removal, which, technically, this one from Faxads.biz does. I can ask these folks to remove our number, but should I, when they never should have spammed it in the first place?
   Every company that has used Faxads.biz I have consciously boycotted, bar one, which apologized after I blogged about it some years ago.
   Question: do I engage the spammer? I don’t trust them as far as I could throw them. Or is this going to the DIA as well?

PS.: The DIA advises that I should request a list removal.—JY


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2 thoughts on “Do you engage a fax spammer?

  1. I don’t know.

    Pardon for shifting the topic in a different direction, but I remember asking my sister (who is an MBA student) about digital faxes. I was not aware that the technology existed, as she told me they are out there, but it’s not terribly widespread. (It’s also integrated into printer hardware, if I remember what she told me.)

    The reason I mention this is 1) I have been frustrated by businesses and government offices (often the two are intertwined) who still rely on the analog fax machine, and cannot take e-mailed .pdf files or other images, and 2) digital fax technology might solve your problem– data is stored to a server or server appliance, and nothing is printed out unless you want it. Essentially, you set things up so your content is filtered.

    I hope you understand. This is the technology that governs e-mail, and I’m still quite puzzled why facsimiles have not been fully integrated.

  2. Hopefully I can get a reply from the DIA as I have queried it. I don’t want to unnecessarily narc on someone who may obey the law, though I’m not exactly confident about Faxads.biz given past behaviour.
       We had used digital faxes since the 1990s till August 2003, when an electrical storm took out our faxmodem. As faxes were a dying technology by then, we never had the unit replaced, and we actually had a spare fax machine from a company that had gone under. So, we decided to make use of what we had, and since the spare machine could take A4 paper, it was a great way to recycle the single-sided stuff.

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