Many offices and professionals see a rise in spam paper faxes : NPR
These days, faxed documents appear mainly on your computer. But doctors and other professionals still count on faxes on paper. And they get a lot of spam with important documents.
Steve Inskeep, host:
Spam is not only an email. It turns out that unwanted messages for older technology seem to be increasing. Vito Emanuel has this story.
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Vito Emanuel, Byline: You probably haven’t heard this sound for a long time, if never. But Diane Rosa hears it every day.
Diane Rosa: We are inside the pharmacy, behind the counter, where the fax is located. It is an old form of communication from the time. We always have it around.
Emanuel: Rosa works in a pharmacy in New York that still gets fax on paper. Pharmacies and doctors’ offices hung on to fax, even if most of the consumers left it behind.
How often does this thing take place during a given week?
Rosa: For the moment, it will be triggered, like – maybe, like once or twice a day.
Emanuel: And she says that around 90% of these faxes are undesirable.
Rosa: Sometimes I don’t even look at them. I look at them and I’m just – garbage.
Emanuel: Even if faxes are on the dark, FCC data suggest that unwanted faxes are strangely increasing. Last year, consumers made 40% more complaints about them than in 2022. Dr. Bruce Katz is a dermatologist in New York. He drowns in unwanted faxes.
Bruce Katz: We can get 60 or 70 faxes per day. But, you know, half of them can be unwanted faxes. You know, sometimes the roofing companies would send us the same fax each month.
Emanuel: And they are not only boring. Once, Katz had to postpone surgery when his staff wrongly threw a blood test result that got lost in the purgatory of unwanted fax.
Katz: Enough enough. I will continue these companies now because they make my life difficult. They will not stop it if you ask them well, so you have to come back with a hammer.
Emanuel: not a real hammer – a trial. Back in the 90s, the Congress adopted the consumer protection law by telephone. This law gives consumers like Katz the right to continue unwanted faxists for $ 500 per page. And when you have to put a unwanted fax legal action, you probably call …
Brian Wanca: Brian Wanca. I have been director in a law firm in the Chicago region, and I have been dealing with unwanted fax cases since 2003.
Emanuel: Wanca is prolific. It files collective appeals where legions of small businesses come together to continue an unwanted faxer. With enough people and faxes, this money is added. A trial settled in 2014 for $ 21 million. And money aside, Wanca hates unwanted faxes.
Wanca: It’s always a nuisance. It takes you away from your business and makes you pay for someone else’s advertising.
Emanuel: However, continuing unwanted faxists is not so simple. First, it may not be possible to identify who you are faxing. Or you could receive faxes by email, where the law is much more muddy. Or you might be one person. And so if the pursuit is not an option, you can always try the John etkins (PH) method. He used to get faxes at work in the 80s. Here’s how he became equal. Let’s say that Etkins obtained an electronic ad. He would record four sheets of paper together in a loop, wrote …
John Etkins: Do not fax us anymore. Remove us from your broadcast list, Yada, Yada, Yada.
Emanuel: And then fax it on the unwanted fax. He let it be working as long as he could. During the day, someone at the other end could see what is going on and unplug the fax.
Etkins: But if you sent it at 3 am, you knew that there was no one who was going to watch this machine. So they arrived in the morning and found half a roll of paper on the ground.
Emanuel: Did it work? Have people stopped sending faxes?
Etkins: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. We have never heard of these people again. Yeah (laughs).
Emanuel: Katz stopped using a physical fax. Now he receives faxes at his email. He still gets some unwanted faxes in his reception box. And this year, believe it or not, the Supreme Court will decide if it can also continue for them.
For NPR news, I am Vito Emanuel.
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