Did you try a search-and-replace in Word, changing the problem characters to something else?
e.g.
0123456789ABCDEF
012345M7XPAVKHEFe.g.
0123456789ABCDEF
012345M7XPAVKHEFThe transcription errors I was getting were not consistent. Like, D would be O or 0 or D, with no apparent rhyme or reason to it. And the turnaround time on each fax attempt was long enough that I focused on doing the image recognition myself instead.
My goofy idea was using the font OCR-A but you'd be very lucky if that Mac came with that.