Reputation Armor

Facebook won a victory for social-networking users everywhere. The U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., awarded Facebook $711 million in damages against Sanford Wallace, aka the spam king.
Facebook said Wallace, Adam Arzoomanian and Scott Shaw broke the law by sending unwanted messages and wall posts to people on Facebook, violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the California Anti-Phishing Act, and the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM).

“While we don’t expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals,” said Sam O’Rourke, general counsel on the Facebook legal team. “Most notably, the judge referred Wallace to the U.S. attorney’s office with a request that Wallace be prosecuted for criminal contempt, which means that in addition to the judgment, he now faces possible jail time. This is another important victory in our fight against spam. We will continue to pursue damages against other spammers.”

Not the First Time

Wallace is the self-proclaimed spam king — and it’s not the first time he has targeted social-networking sites. In 2008, MySpace won a $230 million judgment against Wallace in what was then thought to be the largest-ever spam case. Wallace and Walter Rines organized a phishing scam that harvested MySpace usernames and passwords and blasted out hundreds of thousands of messages for pornography and gambling sites.

“What is shocking to me was that Wallace has already been sued by MySpace previously. So it’s great to see the justice system trying to remove the temptation for people to spam social networks — but evidently, it’s worth the risk,” said Brad Shimmin, an analyst at Current Analysis. “Obviously since Wallace has done it before and is willing to take the risk of doing it elsewhere, it’s a very lucrative practice to phish and spam people.”

This also isn’t the first time Facebook has gone to court to battle spam. Last November, Facebook won its first victory against spammers in the form of an $873 judgment against Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital for sending unwanted messages to people on Facebook. This was the largest judgment ever for an action brought under CAN-SPAM.