So-called spam king Sanford Wallace has been accused with hacking the accounts of half a million Facebook users to send 27 million spam emails.
Wallace carried out three attacks on the social networking site between November 2008 and March 2009. He will encounter a possible 40-year jail sentence and a $2 million fine for multiple counts of fraud, intentional damage to a protected computer and criminal contempt.
Wallace, 43, supposedly managed to evade spam filters of Facebook to post messages on his victims’ friends’ walls. Clicking on a link in the message will guide to a website that gathered names and account details.
The indictment reads, “Facebook’s computer network sustained damage from the large amount of computer network resources used during the defendant’s transmission of spam messages through its system, which resulted in Facebook spending a significant amount of time, money and resources responding to and fixing the damage caused to its network as well as to protect and defend its network from future spam campaigns by the defendant.”
Already for a long time, Wallace has been in the spamming business, allegedly sending out over 30 million spam messages throughout the 1990s. Facebook first sued him in 2009, and he was ordered to stay away from Facebook, but did so in a month. Although he was ordered to pay Facebook $711 million in damages, he filed for bankruptcy soon after.
Wallace was yesterday released on a $100,000 bond and ordered to stay off Facebook and MySpace. He will appear in court in San Jose on August 22.
