Facebook Wins $711 Million From Spammer

Facebook has won yet another massive judgment against a spammer who already owes $234 million to MySpace.

A California federal judge on Thursday granted Facebook's request for a default judgment against Sanford Wallace, who is known to have been involved with spamming since the mid-1990s and with junk faxing before that.


Court documents indicate that Wallace and an associate who was later dropped from the case spammed Facebook users with phishing messages. Those who clicked on the links and submitted login information to phishing sites allowed Wallace and his associate to then spam the phishing victim's friends, in turn generating more potential phishing victims. Facebook claims that Wallace also received payment for redirecting some spam recipients to Web sites that pay for referrals.

Facebook sought damages of more than $7 billion dollars, as allowed under the CAN-SPAM Act and the California business code.

Expressing skepticism in his ruling that such a figure would be proportionate to Wallace's offences, Judge Jeremy Fogel instead awarded Facebook $710,737,650.

:story: Full story: InformationWeek