The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has ordered a Florida travel and vacation marketing company to pay over $1.6 million in forfeiture penalties for sending unsolicited faxes.
The Forfeiture Order cites Mexico Marketing, based in Orlando, FL, for delivering 290 unsolicited fax advertisements for travel services to 80 separate consumers. The Order follows the issuance of a Citation against the company in 2006, and three separate Notices of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture, issued in 2007 and 2008. In each instance, the company failed to respond to the Commission’s communications.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 makes it “unlawful for any person within the United States…to use any telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send, to a telephone facsimile machine, an unsolicited advertisement.”
Violations of the FCC regulations regarding these so-called junk faxes typically result in monetary fines of up to $10,000 per violation. In this case, the Commission cited Mexico Marketing for willful and repeated violations of its junk fax regulations, levying $10,000 fines for each of the 55 instances in which the company sent faxes after receiving requests to stop, and an additional $4500 for each of the remaining 235 faxes sent.
