Porn Spammer Slammed with $711 Million Judgment

By Morgan Mayhew on October 30, 2009

The field of illegal marketers was narrowed recently when a California court ruled against spammer Sanford "Spamford" Wallace in a case brought by social network giant, Facebook. The spam king was ordered to pay $711 million for his digital misdeeds.

Wallace was accused of "phishing" a method of tricking users into handing over login credentials. Once Wallace obtained the credentials, the court found that he would then send unsolicited mail to the hijacked account's friends, with links to commercial sites.

For Wallace (pictured above), this wasn't his first spam bust. In 2008, he was ordered to pay $230 million for spamming on MySpace with messages that promoted porn, ring tones and gambling sites.

While email spammers have been slowly squeezed out of the world's Internet marketplace thanks to intuitive filtering and strict handling processes (such as Outlook's inability to view images unless selected per message), social network spam and comment spam on sites is now the pressing challenge.

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and countless others are plagued by a variety of spammers. While the low level spammer will create fake accounts to market some scheme, the high level spammer, like Wallace, uses much more sophisticated techniques that can by highly intrusive and dangerous for a user's online security.

Unfortunately, Wallace is just the tip of the iceberg and was a rare case of an American spammer. This activity is more frequently coming from Russia, China and other nations that rarely enforce illegal Internet activity or violations of U.S. Law. The UK has agreed to extradite spammers and Australia has pledge to pursue overseas spammers.

To combat the overseas spam traffic and security threats, many site and network administrators have applied blanket blocks of IP addresses originating from those nations.

While Wallace has racked up $941 million in fines, his punishment isn't over just yet as a California District Attorney may pursue charges of criminal contempt, which would result in prison time.

Wallace should have considered what happens to geeks in prison before continuing to annoy millions of people over the Internet with unsolicited messages.