Junk Fax - History

History

Junk faxing came into widespread use in the late 1980s as a result of the development and proliferation of relatively inexpensive desktop fax machines which resulted in rapid growth in the number of fax machines in the U.S. The invention of the computer-based fax board in 1985 by Dr. Hank Magnuski, founder of GammaLink, provided an efficient platform for reaching those fax machines with minimal cost and effort.

The fax machines of this period typically used expensive thermal paper and a common complaint about junk faxes was that they consumed that expensive paper without permission, thus shifting the cost of printing the advertisement to the recipient.

In the U.S., the passage of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act in 1991 along with action by individual states reduced the use of junk faxes at that time. However, by the late 1990s junk faxing had once again become a widespread problem in the U.S., with the entry of a number of large-scale fax broadcasters such as fax.com who boasted of the capacity to send millions of fax advertisements per day. Because the legal restrictions of fax advertising are more widely known today, junk faxes are now predominately used in connection with disreputable or fly-by-night marketers.