Ricoh 1515 getting strange fax and cant stop, help!

[ks0507]

We have a Ricoh 1515 multifunction fax machine (they only use it to fax actually) that keeps getting a HUGE fax, and I mean like 500+ pages of jibberish. You know if you would try to open up an executable or dll file in notepad, and you see all the jumbled mess of random characters? Yeah, that's what is being faxed to us... though it's 3 to 5 lines of this jumbled courrier font text at the top of the page, so the majority of the page is blank.

At the top center of the fax, it usually says the fax number, but this one instead says "your fax number" instead of say 1-800-555-1212 (example).

Even if the phoneline is unplugged, and even if the machine is power cycled, upon turning it back on, it resumes printing this jibberish, wasting paper and hogging up the printer so no real faxes can come though.

There appears to be no way to simply cancel this job. I can't believe they wouldn't build an easy way to cancel the current job, so maybe I am overlooking it? I did find some very cryptic information on google searches about some kind of "SP" mode, and some electronic binary dip switches, etc.... How do I do that exactly?

Bottom line...
1. I need to clear this 500+ page jibberish fax from memory.
2. I need to provide an EASY instruction to the users of this fax machine so that when this happens again, they can simply cancel it.

I was able to cancel it before, but I forget what I did, or what website walked me through it. It was far from easy, as it made me type some kind of code "107 something" and go through some cryptic menus and type a 5002 or 5102 or some kind of code like that. So whatever that did, it worked... however now a few hours later it's doing this again.

Thank you, and I'm greatful if you have any solutions to this problem! We don't know where this gibberish fax is coming from. I wish we could block it!

[Eric1968]

Sounds like your fax has some troubles with its' memory. Had the same thing with a Ricoh Fax 3310L a few years ago. You should call a tech to reset/clear the memory of the machine. Don't try to change things in the Service Mode (= the cryptic menu's) if you don't know what you're doing. This mode is for technicians only and you can really mess things up if youre not trained to do this).

[ks0507]

Ok well they were able to contact the person trying to fax. They were faxing from their computer... not sure what was up there. They said it was just 1 page.

Anyway I was able to get it to stop (and they also told the person faxing to stop as well). From reading on other sites and trying to figure out what multiple people were trying to say.

Ended up having to press the yellow "clear modes" button and enter 107, then hold down the red "Clear/Stop" button until the display changes to sp mode. Now the site I read said to do 5101 - Initalize SRAM. It took awhile to figure this out, it actually comes up as:
FAX (Class2) 0~9 / <> / OK
5.1 0 1 Initialize SRAM

That did the trick.

Not sure why they just didn't program the red clear/stop key to cancel printing a huge fax. That would of been MUCH easier.

[Eric1968]

As an enduser, you can't delete an incoming fax that's in memory. If the machine, for some reason, can not print out the incoming fax succesfully, it will keep trying to print until the machine thinks it has succesfully printed the message. Then it will erase the fax from memory. Computer faxes can really be a problem. I know someone who sometimes is called in the middle of the night by a (computer) fax!

[TonerMunkeh]

A person on the news ages ago received phone calls at 2am every morning for 2 months from a withheld number. Always silence on the other end of the line. Turns out it was a BT payphone trying to phone into the local exchange to give a status report and an engineer had put the wrong number in. Oopsie.