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. Only problem is that this strategy only potentially identifies the advertiser and not the fax blaster...

- Highly recommended: Use Intelius 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.  Instant Landline, VOIP, Fax, Payphone, Toll free, Mobile or Cell phone directory Assistance.  You can instantaneously search through publicly available resources for name and/or address of any residential, business, cell, internet, fax, mobile, pager or pay phone including name, current address (when available), phone company, connection status and more.

- 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.