* Junk fax ropes in two unwitting companies
On Aug. 12 at 07:09 a.m. my fax received a prospectus claiming to be from a marketing company (let’s call it Orfilian) on behalf of a high-tech start-up (let’s call it Bazoonium – and yes, I Googled both names and they didn’t show up). The fax urged people to buy the stock, claiming it would rise in value by orders of magnitude within months.
It also included a toll-free number for getting out of the junk-fax list (I didn’t dial it) and claimed that Orfilian had received lots of shares in return for touting the stock.
I dialed *69 on my fax machine to determine the origin of this junk fax. Unfortunately, the number it gave did not produce any identification of the owner using the reverse-lookup feature of Switchboard.com and neither did the get-out-of-junk number.
I looked up Orfilian on the Web but had no luck finding contact information (they use a Web form for e-mail enquiries) so I used a DNS lookup on orfilian.com with SamSpade v1.4, found the phone number in the DNS entry and heard a phone message from the system administrator explicitly stating that the company does not send junk fax and they didn’t know where the particular stock-touting fax came from.
Using the same WHOIS technique on bazoonium.com via SamSpade, I spoke with someone at Bazoonium; he was very nice and thoroughly exasperated by the inclusion of his company’s name in this junk fax. He and his colleagues had already received several phone calls from angry recipients of the same junk fax I got. The company is currently involved in a merger and there are 6 million shares in public hands. This person was concerned that the bad publicity from the fake fax might harm the company at this sensitive time.
I suggested that he obtain affidavits from everyone in the company affirming their complete lack of involvement in this junk fax and that he keep a record of possible financial losses resulting from the fraud (all of this after the usual “IANAL” warning – “I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice: for legal advice, consult an attorney”).
More in the next column.
