Sanford Wallace from Las Vegas, who is also known as “Spam king” has been sentenced to 2.5 years in prison and ordered to pay $310,628.55 in compensation for sending numerous spam messages to Facebook users.
Meet Facebook Spammer “Spam King” who is Sentenced to 2.5 years in Prison
According to the sources, Stanford Wallace had flooded more than 27 million spam messages to 500,000 legitimate facebook accounts in the period of 2008 to 2009. Sanford Wallace spammed people with a link that ultimately redirects to an external website with a junk message that fools facebook users to give up their log-in credentials. He managed to redirect those people to an affiliate site that paid him for the traffic.
According to the U.S Attorney’s office, the additional information about Stanford Wallace is supplied “Wallace illegally obtained, stored, and exploited Facebook user account information and earned money by redirecting users to other websites. Specifically, Wallace admitted he opened a fictitious Facebook account in the name of “David Frederix” to test his spam messages and created an automated process to sign into a Facebook user’s account, retrieve a list of all of the user’s friends, and then send a message to each of the user’s friends’ Facebook accounts.
“The message was designed to trick legitimate Facebook account holders into accessing a website listed in the message that was purportedly from a Facebook friend. Once the user entered his or her information, the user would be redirected to an affiliate website. Wallace further admitted that he earned money for directing traffic to the websites and stored users’ email addresses and passwords in order to continue sending spam messages”
Facebook had previously registered a lawsuit against Sanford Wallace under the CAN-SPAM act in March 2009 which represents that Wallace cannot attempt to reach facebook but the defendant logged into his Facebook account while traveling on a Virgin Airlines flight from Las Vegas, Nevada, to New York.
Sanford Wallace started flooding people with spam messages way back in 1991, Since then he encountered lots of lawsuits filed by Facebook, MySpace, AOL and much more. As per Default judgment, Sanford Wallace was punished with almost $1 billion fine. However, they couldn’t collect it but this time, the court ordered him to pay $$310,628.55 in restitution and also sentenced to 2.5years of prison.
