Spam King Finally Pays Price

A man once dubbed the "Spam King" has been jailed for two and a half years. However, Sanford Wallace's sentence is for emails which were fraudulent rather than simply unwanted.

Wallace first came to infamy by sending unwanted faxes before it became illegal. In the late 1990s he became one of the first mass spammers and was sued by several Internet providers, including AOL. He was so open about sending spam, that at one point he even got the attention of lawyers at Hormel Foods (the company which makes Spam - a meat product), in which they claimed Wallace was breaching trademark rights because of web domains he owned that also had the name 'spam' in them. (Source: arstechnica.com)

Malware Scam Was a Step Up

After a brief spell out of the computer world, Wallace began distributing malware and then using pop-up messages to offer the victims the chance to buy what he called an antispyware program. That led to the FTC obtaining a $4 million default judgment against him when he failed to defend against claims of unlawful activity, though he never paid the money.

His next step was to hit MySpace with phishing emails, which tricked users into handing over their login details. Wallace then used the compromised accounts to send spam messages. In a particularly cheeky defense, he claimed this was not spam because users were inherently willing to receive messages from their friends' account (even though the friend no longer controlled it).

27 Million Bogus Messages

He repeated the same tactics with Facebook - reportedly hacking half a million accounts, and sending 27 million messages. That also led to further legal action and, between the MySpace and Facebook cases, he was ordered to pay $941 million in damages.

A court also ordered him to stop using Facebook, an order he ignored by continuing to pull the same scam. That led to a criminal conviction on two counts. One was contempt of court for ignoring the order.

The other was fraud in relation to email. The court concluded that he earned money in affiliate fees by using spam messages to send links to Facebook users. Although Wallace didn't directly make money from the people he was fooling, the court decided there was a close enough link between his misleading people and his profiting to constitute fraud. As well as the jail time, Wallace was also fined $310,000. (Source: justice.gov)

What's Your Opinion?

Is the sentence appropriate? Is it surprising it took more than 25 years for Wallace to end up behind bars? Should the law change to make it a criminal offense to send mass spam, even if there's no fraud involved?