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How to identify junk faxers 

The good news is that you can always find out who is sending you the junk faxes if you follow the steps below.

First use this page: How to identify the fax broadcaster

If you get an unsolicited fax, follow this procedure (one of the first three is almost always guaranteed to work):

  • Have the phone company put a call trap on your line. When you get a fax, you dial a special code after receipt or keep a call log and enter it periodically. They can then release this information to the police/sheriff and the police/sheriff will release it to you or your attorney in response to a subpoena. You can have the information you want within days and it's admissible and credible in court. We highly recommend this. See the Q&A for more on traps.
  • The simplest way to find out who they are is to pretend you are actually interested in their offer and try to fool them into giving you their real address, e.g, you don't have a credit card and need to mail them a check or you are the purchasing agent at your company and you have to have an address to send the Purchase Order. Be creative. But this can only ID the advertiser and not the blaster.
  • Highly recommended: Use Abika which offers a very comprehensive set of searches and is very similar to Docusearch. Unlike Docusearch they can trace the source of a fax call into your phone number. See details here. 
  • Also recommended: Use Docusearch to find who owns the phone number (such as the 800 or 900 number). This almost always works, but it isn't free. If your time is valuable, this is the fastest way to go. You only pay if they find the answer. For 900 numbers, this is the way to go since you won't be able to use the method in the previous bullet. You can then have a lawyer subpoena the 900 number company to find out who their client is. 
  • For pump and dump faxes, here's a possible approach. A few months after the fax appears, take a look at the price and volume graph for the stock. Also goto sec.gov and lookup filings by the issuer. I did this last night for an issue that a client of mine got a fax for last September and turned up the marketing agreement under which the presumptive faxer got the shares he dumped. Other filings to look for would be insider or high-volume purchases or sales, which must be reported.

Here are some other ways:

Other methods of identifying a company.

  • List of known remove numbers, the associated company and any other pertinent information.
  • Find out who owns a PO Box has techniques to find out the owner of PO Box or PMB
  • Look at the secretary of state website for their tax information.

  • Search D&B for the free information available (pay if you want more detailed info)
  • See who the FCC have spanked recently.

When you find out, let us know and we'll post it here.

This page is maintained by Andy.

Other useful info

Registered agent, officers, and other information about companies.

For all states, check and http://www.pac-info.com/and http://www.residentagentinfo.com/

These are all included in the links above... I just have them here for shortcut because I use them a lot.
California

See also investigative tools

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