If there's a method of business communication, there are people who who want to exploit the method to do harm to another, whether it's for monetary gain or just for their personal jollies. There are some fax scams that you need to be on the lookout for:

Black Fax scam

Fax machines, naturally, have the “reply” button designed to allow you to quickly and easily send messages back to the person contacting you. Back Fax scams rely on you not paying enough attention, while luring you in with an offer that looks too good to be true, or a limited time offer, or any of the other method that has you thinking more about the content of the message than about what you're doing.

These messages are sent by premium 1-900 lines, and sending messages there incurs a very heavy cost.

How to defend yourself from this? Always pay attention to the sender's number, and be wary of the context of the fax message, if they have costs or fees connected to the replying, don't reply.

Black Fax scam

If you are using a fax modem or if your fax machine doesn't automatically print but accepts documents to your computer, you won't suffer too much financial damage from getting bombarded with a fully black page, but black fax attacks are rather costly if you are set on auto-receive. This malicious attack can run you out of paper, ink, or, in the worst case, can cause your fax machine to malfunction.

Junk Fax

All of the e-mail and phone scams are more or less applicable to the medium of fax machines. If you've got a fax from a nigerian prince looking for a way to hide his money somewhere, well, just file that in the “very unlikely” folder and never reply. If your credit card number is required or if the message requires you to send a lot of personal identification, you are most likely being targeted by a scam. The best defense from junk fax scams is to get yourself familiar with most widespread scams, just so you know what kind of methods scammers use to get to you.

Matt Gerchow

Matt Gerchow is an author, marketer, inventor, husband, father and yoga enthusiast. He enjoys travel to distant lands , fine wine, time with his family and dinner with friends.