Another massive, yet uncollectible, court fine has been levied against spam king Sanford Wallace. Facebook announced that a California court has awarded the social networking Web site $711 million in damages against the ever-elusive, ever-defiant online marketer.
Facebook sued Wallace for accessing accounts without user permission and sending them fake posts and messages. In a post on its blog, Facebook said that the court referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney’s office for prosecution for criminal contempt, meaning he could face jail time – if anyone can find him.
In the 1990s, Wallace ran a business that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day, earning him millions of dollars and the nicknames “Spam King” and “Spamford.”
The award to Facebook is the latest in a series of massive fines and awards against Wallace, most of which have gone uncollected. Last year, social networking Web site MySpace won a $230 million judgment against Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, in a case brought under the federal CAN-SPAM law. In 2006, Wallace was fined $4 million after the Federal Trade Commission accused him of running an operation that infected computers with software called adware that caused pop-up ads to flood users’ computers.
“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, associate general counsel for Facebook, in a blog post. “This is another important victory in our fight against spam.”
Facebook said the judgment is the second-largest anti-spam award in history. A year ago, Facebook won an $873 million judgment against Adam Guerbuez and his business, Atlantis Blue Capital, which inundated users with sexually explicit spam messages.
Wallace’s exact whereabouts are unknown, but he is believed to be living in Las Vegas.
Why it matters: Spammers continue to pose a serious problem for Internet service providers, social networks, and other legitimate online businesses because spammers are so difficult to track down. A multi-million dollar judgment against a spammer may make a splash in the media, but, for the most part, it is a Pyrrhic victory, since it is almost always uncollectible.