May 14th, 2008
Spam king, phishing buddy hit for $200m
Spam king Sanford Wallace and phishing buddy Walter Rines hijacked some 300,000 MySpace accounts and sent hundreds of thousands of spam messages and comments across the service. They got their punishment today: a whopping $225 million judgment in favor of MySpace, Information Week reports.
“By using hijacked accounts to send these unsolicited messages, defendants created the false impression that these messages came from a MySpace recipient’s friend or another legitimate MySpace user, rather than from defendants,” court documents state.
A blog purporting to be Wallace’s said he actually helped get MySpace off the ground with his spamming services. The site registration address matches the address on the court documents.
I wonder how many people actually know how MySpace got started. Their original team (the people who also started the company xdrive) HIRED my company to send “tell-a-friend” messages through email to promote them several years ago, and it was actually MY TRAFFIC that helped LAUNCH MySpace. Their partner at the time was “euniverse” who ran the biggest “tell-a-friend” spam network on the Internet.
Wallace wasn’t in court to learn of the judgment, since he says he was never served.
