Monday, August 8, 2011

The "king of spam" risks more than forty years in prison

Self-proclaimed "Spam King" Sanford Wallace risks more than forty years in prison and more than $ 2 million fine. The man, aged 43, is accused of approximately 500,000 compromised Facebook accounts, between November 2008 and March 2009, and have sent more than 27 million spam. Wallace pleaded not guilty at a hearing Thursday, August 4, in federal court in San Jose in the United States.


As to compromise the accounts of users of social network, the suspect used the technique of "phishing" , which is to fraudulently obtain credentials of a user, by mimicking an email from an administration or a trusted site. Mr. Wallace then sent new messages to contacts profit account compromise.

In 2009, a judge had already ordered Sanford Wallace to pay a record $ 711 million to Facebook, for these massive spam mailing. In its complaint, the social network, which claims 750 million registered, described Wallace as "a notorious swindler of the Internet has been involved in various illegal activities of spamming and other malicious software since the mid-1990s ".

In 2008, MySpace had also received $ 230 million in damages. Sanford Wallace and an accomplice, Walter Rines, were convicted of sending messages to enable them to fairepasser for typical users of MySpace and the vigilance of their recipients. The Federal Trade Commission, responsible for the fairerespecter competition law, also sentenced Mr.

Wallace in 2006 to pay a fine of $ 4 million, for spreading software open pop-ups unsolicited by the user. Sanford Wallace must return to court Aug. 22.

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