Allied Telesyn followup

2006/12/09

Categories: Personal Spam

This is just a followup to my article about the Allied Telesyn junk fax class action.

1. It got written about. If that link doesn’t work, here’s another link to the article at the Rocky Mountain News

2. I did finally find the thing that really bugged me in their claims of long ago; this comes from Allied Telesyn’s counsel.

In one prior letter I stated: "we expect an extremely high claim rate because the original fax list was "scrubbed", i.e. personal contact was made with every individual on the list and the contact information was carefully verified. Therefore, if the notices are sent to the same fax numbers as the original scrubbed list, a high response rate of close to 100% is to be expected." In my discussions with Rob, the only reason that I ever suggested fax notice was because the original list was a list of phone and fax numbers.
The problem is, the claim that personal contact was made is totally false. They never contacted me.

In the end, that was a major factor in my evaluation of them. I don’t know whether it’s the attorney or the company that originated this false claim, but someone in there said something because it was convenient, not because it was true. Or, perhaps, it was the list broker; they bought the list, so perhaps they just believed that someone selling them a list of numbers they couldn’t legally used would magically be telling the truth.

This came up in the context of their discussion of how they didn’t have addresses; eventually, claim notices were sent based on reverse lookups, rather than by fax, because faxing claim notices for a junk fax suit adds insult to injury. I don’t think they ever did say where they purchased the list.