Any good ways to stop fax spam?

In the past few weeks, my elderly parents have been hit with an unusually large amount of fax spam.  Last night, a fax came in at 4:00 AM.  Somehow, their phone number must have been included in some spammer's database.

Any ideas about how to stop this, short of changing their phone number (which they've had since 1966)?

I ran some Google searches, but I didn't come up with much.  The latest fax has an opt-out phone number at the bottom, but I'm worried that calling the number will only increase the amount of spam.

Thanks.

Alex Chernavsky
Thursday, January 29, 2004

http://www.junkfax.org/

Michael H. Pryor
Thursday, January 29, 2004

Thanks, Michael.  That was fast.

Alex Chernavsky
Thursday, January 29, 2004

Good luck with that....

The "solution" we came up with was to take out our real fax machine and the expensive toner replacements and put a old PC with a fax modem instead. Now atleast we can delete the crap faxes without wasting any toner and for those odd useful faxes we just print them...using our old all in one fax machine as the printer :-) As an aside we do not have to worry being out of paper :-)

Dunno why no one makes a fax machine with a small LCD display to review faxes so one can do this easily.

Code Monkey
Thursday, January 29, 2004

>>The "solution" we came up with was to take out our real fax machine and the expensive toner replacements and put a old PC with a fax modem instead

Same here. I guess you could also run a smarter fax software that can discriminate calls, so that it would ring if it's a voice call, and remain silent when it's a fax call, so that would solve the issue for the parents of the original poster.

FredF
Friday, January 30, 2004

Use a premium rate number?

John Ridout
Friday, January 30, 2004

I would seriously recommend Code Monkey's recommendation, but get one fast enough to flip through those fax images on the screen, not a 286!

Li-fan Chen
Sunday, February 1, 2004

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