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January 12, 2004
Fax.com's Impressive Chutzpah
Wired has an amazing story about Fax.com. In a nutshell, Fax.com has flaunted US and state laws against sending junk/spam faxes, going so far as to tell a US District Court of Appeals that it wouldn't be posting a $2.75 million bond. To date, it has been fined tens of millions of dollars and is even facing a billion-dollar lawsuit, yet no government agency or individual plaintiff has recovered a dime. Part of this is due to Fax.com's having split itself into multiple smaller companies and routing its revenue through a maze of US and international bank accounts.
"Fax.com Chief Executive Kevin Katz has denied any knowledge of these companies or any knowledge of where former Fax.com employees now work. In a Dec. 8 deposition for Kirsch's lawsuit, Katz denied working with a former business partner until he was shown a signed contract, said he didn't know who was working at Fax.com anymore, and didn't know he was the CEO until reminded by his lawyer. Katz also denied knowledge of any of the successor companies named in the FCC order. "
How does this happen? Is the US legal system so castrated when it comes to dealing with corporate misbehavior that a company can simply tell the courts to go take a flying leap? Have we not learned anything from debacles over the past decades like the savings & loan disaster, Enron, and the WorldCom/MCI mess? Apparently not.
Having been woken up myself a few times in the past couple months at 3AM by a phone call from a fax machine, my hunch is that my own number was being tried by a Fax.com server. If people like Kevin Katz can invade my privacy, why can't theirs be? Per US law, it would be illegal for me to call upon people to harm Mr. Katz and/or his possessions. It would be illegal for me to suggest that people damage the property of one of Fax.com's children companies, Tech Access Systems Corp, which resides at 521 ½ South Myrtle Avenue, Suite 1 in Monrovia, CA 91016 at the phone number of 626-359-6464*.
In the end, I hope someone in Washington DC wakes up and does something to address the whole unethical gvernance issue. Or, is allowing this type of behavior what our president and the Republican party mean by being "pro-business?"
* That information was gotten from junkfax.com, a consumer advocacy group that is dedicated to defeating Fax.com and spam-faxers like it.