That said, it seems to me that one of the most basic concepts of law is that of proportional justice. The punishment should roughly fit the damage the crime causes. Fines of hundreds of millions of dollars for annoyance seems excessively disproportionate to me, to say the least.

I would even recommend NOT calling the number. It might actually be one that will record that the phone number entered is a valid fax number, and they might even (fraudulently) claim that you had called their opt-in number. Or, they might simply sell your validated fax number to other fax-bombers.

It’s sort of along the lines of the spam email you get, where they offer a means to unsubscribe to their spam. Unless you’re dealing with a company you’re confident is legitimate, you do not want to reply, or click the unsubscribe link, or whatever. You’ve just told someone that the email address to which you are supposedly unsubscribing is a valid email address, and that’s very valuable to them. They turn around and sell your email address on a list of known, valid addresses. “Unsubscribing” is a sure way to increase your spam exponentially. The same may hold true for junk faxes.

The fax itself is proof that you faxed them, but there is no proof of the phonecall asking for the fax.

Not to mention that you could fax stuff from Kinkos or any other such place in th nam of your comeptitors and not have any traceable contract.

“Strict liability” (that is, intentions don’t matter) laws should be (and used to be) EXTREMELY rare, and this law shows why.

The people the law is designed to target and the ones who most easily avoid it; th people most likely to be caught and severely punished by the law are those least in need of it.

In short, the law SUCKS. It’s unjust.

This is like most pirate protection schemes: the professional pirates have cracked every code ever created bfor it even hit the market, and the legal owner who wants to make a backup copy (or even re-install, in the case of some software protection) is the on who gets screwed.

Not helpful… actively harmful, in fact.

I just threw a whole bunch away when I cleaned my office, but they’re typically for “penny stocks” and such and designed to obscure who’s sending them – and believe me, I’ve tried to track down the people. (And I might add, I’m pretty good at tracking, having tracked and recovered my stolen car and tracked and prosecuted a guy who did a hit-and-run on my Honda Insight.) Many junk faxes offer a number to call to have your number removed from the list. It often doesn’t seem to work.

In this situation (not a fax.com deal) we had faxed 1,340 businesses over the past year, but this entire group had a previous business relationship with us. None of the 1,340 Louisiana businesses complained about our faxes to them. That did not matter to the lawyer. The one fax in hand and the 1,340 list was enough to demand $250,000 and to get class action status. The judge in the case said that since no other plaintiffs filed a claim, my competitor could have $1,500 (statutory maximum) and that the lawyer could get half and the judge would pick a charity to get the other half of the $250,000.

My competitor effectively pushed our legal cost beyond our capacity, the straw that broke the Camels back. He killed us with no more effort then calling my office and acting like an interested customer. Proving any of this is impossible – so the Louisiana lawyer has a free ride to black mail us out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This could happen to any business, no contract need exist for law suits to be filed. I could easily send 1,000 faxes under the name of my competitor and make sure that most of them land on the desk of entrepreneurial lawyers in 50 different states. Within days my competitor would have to answer hundreds of law suits in different jurisdictions or face certain business failure from default judgments. There would be no way out of such an event for a small business. This is a very bad law. KC Truby

Although IANAL, I think that the concept of “willful blindness”, which is supported by the law, would apply. Putting your head in the sand and saying “I didn’t know the car was stolen, even though I paid a crackhead $100 for it” would not suffice as a defense against a receipt of stolen goods charge, it seems to me, but then again I repeat IANAL. Perhaps one of the many that frequent this site can help us out on this.

As for hiring someone to blast faxes advertising your competitor, that is indeed a scanario I can envision. However, the difference there is that your competitor would have no contract with the faxer so would not be liable for the action. If something is done on your behalf yet you did not want it to be done or cause it to be done, I don’t see how that could result in a succesful tort action. Of course, it would take a lot of attorney’s fees to point that out to the plaintiff’s attorney.

If that type of thing was successful, I think we would see a lot of ambulance chasers hiring a blaster to fax people on behalf of large corps like MS or Wal-Mart, then turning around and suing those corps.

In fact, given the difficulty in determining just who you CAN legally send them to, it seems that contracting to a third party specializing in these matters would be the most responsible way to go about it.

I have no idea just how the contract between KC and whoever was written, service/product he was trying to promote or the price paid for the service. You seem to imply that if the price was fair(1000 faxes fro $100?) then he should not have questioned it.

What would you say is a ‘reasonable’ rate that would exempt a person from being held responsible for the act of another? Isn’t this idea a little odd? It certainly does not seem supported in the law.

It seems to me that that the only crime KC committed was hiring someone who contracted for a legal service what was performed illegally and who was perhaps not skeptical enough of the offer. You seem to be saying that the law should destroy the lives of such people and all who work for them.

If the faxes did not go to potential clients, then KC did not benefit. The people that committed the scam are the ones that should be punished. Not the folks duped into participating.

I cannot wait for someone to contract to have ads for the competition faxed. The scammers will run and hide making proving that it was someone else who hired them almost impossible. The lawyers will decend and destroy your competitor. And it only cost you $100.