'Spam King' Sanford Wallace Sentenced To 2.5 Years In Prison For Facebook Phishing Scam (bbc.com)

Xochil writes: Sanford Wallace gets a two-year prison term and $310K fine on charges of fraud and criminal contempt for sending over 27 million spam messages to Facebook users. Sanford Wallace has made a name for himself over the course of the last several years. In 1998, the "Spam King" announced he would put an end to spamming on his part, instead resorting to a new scheme in which ISPs would be paid to receive the mail. Flash forward to 2004, the Associated Press reported that a judge issued a temporary restraining order against Wallace for alleged spyware distribution. Last August, Wallace admitted to compromising around 500,000 Facebook accounts, using them to send over 27 million spam messages through Facebook's servers, between November 2008 and March 2009. While he could have been sentenced to as many as 16 years in prison, he was only sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison and five years of supervised release. In addition, Wallace was ordered to pay about one cent for every message sent or about 60 cents per account compromised, totaling $310,628.55 in restitution. The phishing scam consisted of Wallace automating the process of signing into a Facebook user's account, retrieving a list of their friends and sending them each a message that encouraged them to log into a website. The website would trick users into divulging their Facebook username and password before directing them to an affiliate website that would pay him for the traffic.

Comments

Re:Let's hope

[rmdingler]

Full disclosure: I'm an unrepentant American. It's not easy being a world power. Ask Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, and Portugal et al why it didn't work out for them.

Of course American jails are horrible. They're full of Americans.

There's a school of thought that making prisons uncomfortable is just desserts and even a deterrent for some..

Re:Spamford Wallace

[techno-vampire]

If you want to get rid of most telemarketing, put all of your phone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry. Then, make a habit of reporting violations so that the feds have the evidence they need to enforce the law. This won't stop all of it, but it will keep away the more honest companies and give you a way to fight back against scammers.