Sanford Wallace, the Las Vegas man accused of tricking his way into 500,000 Facebook accounts and flooding them with spam faces 40 years in jail and fines up to $2 million for his crimes.
(DailyMail)–The Las Vegas man accused of tricking his way into 500,000 Facebook accounts and flooding them with spam faces 40 years in jail for the crimes.
Sanford Wallace, the self-proclaimed ‘Spam King,’ has pleaded not guilty in an initial court appearance after turning himself in to the FBI this week.
He was slapped with six counts of email fraud, three counts of intentional damage to a protected computer and two counts of criminal contempt.
The indictment, filed last month, said Mr Wallace, 43, compromised about 500,000 Facebook accounts between November 2008 and March 2009.
He is accused of sending massive amounts of spam through the company’s servers on three separate occasions.
Mr Wallace would collect Facebook account info with ‘phishing’ messages that conned users into providing their passwords, the indictment said.
He would then use that information to log into their accounts and post spam messages on their friends’ Facebook walls, the indictment said.
Those who clicked on the link, thinking it came from their friend, were redirected to websites that paid Mr Wallace for the traffic.
In 2009, Palo Alto-based Facebook sued Mr Wallace under federal anti-spam laws known as CAN-SPAM, prompting a judge to issue a temporary restraining order banning him from using the website.
But Mr Wallace allegedly violated the order within a month, prompting the criminal contempt charges.
The judge in the lawsuit ultimately issued a default judgment against Mr Wallace for $711million, one of the largest-ever anti-spam awards.
Mr Wallace was also referred for possible criminal prosecution.
The indictment came after a two-year investigation of Wallace by the FBI, prosecutors said.
Chris Sonderby, Facebook’s lead security and investigations counsel, said: ‘We will continue to pursue and support both civil and criminal consequences for spammers or others who attempt to harm Facebook or the people who use our service.’
Mr Wallace was released after posting $100,000 bond Thursday, and he’s due back in court on Aug. 22.
His lawyer, K.C. Maxwell, said: ‘Mr Wallace looks forward to defending himself.’
Mr Wallace earned the nicknames ‘Spam King’ and ‘Spamford’ as chief of a company called Cyber Promotions that sent as many as 30million junk e-mails per day in the 1990s.
In May 2008, MySpace won a $230million judgment over junk messages sent to its members when a Los Angeles federal judge ruled against Mr Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, in another case brought under the same anti-spam laws cited in the Facebook lawsuit.
In 2006, Mr Wallace was fined $4million after the Federal Trade Commission accused him of running an operation that infected computers with software that caused flurries of pop-up ads, known as spyware.
If convicted on all counts in the latest criminal case, Mr Wallace could faces more than 40 years in prison and a $2million fine.
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