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'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.
You know, any high school kid that demonstrates it knows more about computers than the average CIO and hacks a server that was secured as well as a barndoor with a hay stack in front of it gets some verdict where he can't get near a computer any time soon.
Why is that waste of oxygen still allowed near anything using electricity?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.