Friday...

[fajrdrako]

A weird thing happened at work.

Yesterday, someone phoned the Box Office, quite irate, to say, "Stop faxing me. I don't want your faxes."

We weren't sending her any faxes. Not her, whoever she was, or anyone else. The fax machine was right there in my office and no one was touching it, or had done so all day.

She said she was receiving a long (ten page) fax with our fax number on it. It was some sort of offensive racist manifesto.

We thought this was very strange, but assured her it wasn't from us.

Today I got a phone call from a police detective in Vancouver BC. She said that she had received a ten-page fax from us. We never sent it, I explained. She asked me a number of questions about who we were and I told her about the phone call yesterday. She said the material was "disgusting" and suggested that we get in touch with Bell to see if they could trace it.

We phoned Bell Canada and explained what had happened. They said that a person receiving the fax could dial *69 and find out what number the fax was really coming from. Since we have neither sent nor received the fax, we don't have much to go on.

We alerted the local police, and got our very own report number.

Let's hope we hear nothing more, and it doesn't happen again.

It's creepy.

Comments

[dargie.livejournal.com]

That really is creepy. The least assholes like that could do would be to own up to their assholery

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Not likely! They'd rather frame us for their hate-crimes. I wish in retrospect I'd asked the detective more questions but I was a little too disturbed by the idea of what was happening to think of it. I might at least have asked how she got our phone number, which isn't the same as our fax number. Presumably the fax-senders put our numbers on their ranting. One of the things the detective said to me was, "You're in Quebec, are you?" and I said, "No, I'm in Ontario," then wondered afterwards why she asked that. Perhaps the racism was anti-French, or anti-English?

I hope they get caught.

I'm sort of bemused by the effrontery of sending this stuff to a police station. I wonder if it's being sent places on purpose, or just at random.

[dargie.livejournal.com]

Interestingly enough the only serious scam I ever had pulled on me originated in a deli in Quebec. How do I know? I checked with name and address to find out the location of the number they'd given me.

Here in Chicago we're having a similar problem. Someone is broadcasting racial slurs over fire radios. There's been a lot of screaming for the fire department to clean up its act and bust the perps, but the best information they actually have so far points to it being someone from outside who is patching into the fire bands.

[jkluge.livejournal.com]

Hey, girl!

Stop faxing me! ;-)

(Seriously, though, that *is* annoying. I'd be disturbed and indignant, too; like, 'this is some weird shit!' and 'well, *fuck*, of all the places to pin it on, why us?')

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Stop faxing me! ;-)

LOL!

Hey, if I faxed *you*, it would be interesting slash stuff with characters you like and you wouldn't be complaining!

As for the "why us", yes, why? Does someone have a grudge against the theatre? Did they see a play they didn't like and decided to get revenge for a couple of hours of boredom? If they used both our fax and phone number they must have done it deliberately - malice aforethought? - or did they just grab it randomly from our brochure, or a directory, or the web page?

I don't know. We may never know.

[lilithlotr.livejournal.com]

That fax number shown as the sending number can usually be programmed in by the sender. I've seen it happen where someone bought a fax machine used and never reprogrammed it, and it had some totally unrelated name and/or number on the outgoing fax. I've never had anyone deliberately falsify one, but no reason they couldn't.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

We should probably count ourselves lucky that this sort of thing doesn't happen more - or maybe it does happen more, and most people just ignore it and we don't hear about it.

It just goes to show that the phrase "don't believe everything you read" extends to fax machines!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

For some reason your first sentence made me think of the recent Catwoman graphic novel, where she comes up against the Quebec mafia. That Quebec! - I associate it with good restaurants in Gatineau, but hey, it's clearly a hotbed of crime.

Racial slurs on the fire radios - yeah, it's the same sort of thing, and strange enough. And you know, maybe it isn't entirely so bad that racism is so universally hated now that the racist have to go underground and resort to false names and faked numbers just to express themselves.