{ christian kolos // design blog }

The term black fax refers to a prank fax transmission, consisting of one or more pages entirely filled with a uniform black tone. The sender's intention is typically to consume as much of the recipient's fax ink, toner or thermal paper or disk space as possible, thus costing the recipient money and/or denying the recipient the use of their machine (this is similar to computer-based denial of service attacks). This is made easier because the fax transmission protocols compress the solid black image very well, so a very short fax call can produce many pages.
Black faxes have been used to harass large institutions or government departments, to retaliate against the senders of junk faxes, or merely as simple pranks.