If you’re a regular reader of the DocuSign blog (and who isn’t these days), you’ll know that one of our themes is how fax machines are, needless to say, problematic when it comes to securely and reliably getting signatures on documents.  As anyone in the financial services industry will tell you, the third or fourth generations of fax documents are pretty much useless as legal documents that might be used to prove anything in a court of law.

But this one beats all in demonstrating the failing of the fax machine. The Boston Globe reports:

Police shut down a strip mall yesterday in this small western suburb after employees at a Bank of America branch mistook a botched fax for a bomb threat.

Apparently, a fax sent by Bank of America’s corporate office to its Ashland, Mass., branch was garbled in transmission. When it came out the other end, a bank employee saw clip art of a hand lighting a match to a bomb and called police.  The fax, meant as an internal marketing document, prompted a bomb scare resulting in the bank and a dozen nearby businesses being evacuated for over two hours.

Folks, lets unplug those heinous fax machines and stick to email and Web-based solutions for communicating. The time has come.

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