Facebook awarded $711 million in spam lawsuit
Facebook was awarded $711 million in a judgment Thursday against self-described "spam king" Sanford Wallace.
Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California granted Facebook's application for a default judgment against Wallace for violating the Can-Spam Act, which bans "false and misleading" marketing e-mails. Fogel also found that Wallace "willfully violated" a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction issued in the case and referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney's Office for prosecution of criminal contempt.
"The record demonstrates that Wallace willfully violated the statutes in question with blatant disregard for the rights of Facebook and the thousands of Facebook users whose accounts were compromised by his conduct," Fogel wrote in his judgment order, which also permanently prohibits Wallace from accessing the Facebook Web site or creating a Facebook account, among other restrictions.
Facebook said the order should serve as a strong deterrent against spammers.
"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," Sam O'Rourke, Facebook's lead counsel for litigation and intellectual property, wrote in a Facebook blog post. "This is another important victory in our fight against spam. We will continue to pursue damages against other spammers."
Facebook sued Sanford and two others in February alleging they used phishing sites or other means to fraudulently gain access to Facebook accounts and used them to distribute phishing spam throughout the network.
Wallace earned the nicknames "Spamford" and "spam king" for his past role as head of CyberPromotions, a company responsible for sending as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s.
In May 2008, Wallace and another defendant were ordered to pay MySpace.com $234 million following a trial at which Wallace repeatedly failed to turn over documents or even show up in court.
Wallace has also been previously sued by the Federal Trade Commission and companies such as AOL and Concentric Network. In May 2006, Wallace and his company Smartbot.net were ordered by a federal court to turn over $4.1 million.
As large as it is, the Facebook judgment against Wallace is not the largest for a case brought under the Can-Spam Act. Late last year, the federal court in San Jose awarded Facebook $873 million in damages against a Canadian man accused of spamming users of the site.
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. Before joining CNET News in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers. E-mail Steven. 
Spamford Wallace has been a PITA since way the hell back in the day. He's got so many judgements on his sorry arse that it would take winning Powerball every week for a decade straight just to pay them all off.
Back in the day, the line between legit email and outright spamming was pretty gray, fuzzy, and huge - most businesses were still feeling their way around the Internet, and way too many had inadvertently spammed the planet, while others missed out on legit opportunities (e.g. advertising in customer-subscribed newsletters) for fear of spamming.
Nowadays, that line is a lot sharper, blacker, and fairly easy to determine. Most of the Sanford-Wallace type of spamming is done by the criminals and the malware-mongers. No legit business dares to send unsolicited commercial email (better known as UCE) to anyone these days - so now it's just the pill-pushers and the scam artists who bother with doing it on the down-low.
Some of it also comes form legitimate companies who think that they are buying into genuine mass mailing campaigns where the people receiving the email are willing recipients.
Will the money ever be paid?
Kinda hypocritical, isn't it?
In all seriousness, it's not only the fact that he spammed users but the method in which he gained access to people's accounts that is ultimately the core of the issue, in my opinion. Had he signed up to spam people by becoming an advertiser or made an annoying app and the like that constantly spammed feeds, then his actions would be acceptable since the user has options to opt out and Facebook could have ceased his activities.
I'm sure if Mr Spamking made his own web site and started spamming on it, Facebook or any other companies would have no say-so in the matter.
Now...take a claw hammer to his hands. That has a tendency to change one's perspective.
This is by far the worst punishment for Fogel! Oh the horror! What would life be like without a Facebook account?!
Let's see if he learns his lesson then!
- by Vasudius October 30, 2009 1:01 PM PDT
- Now, what I want to know is... What does Facebook plan to do with the awarded money? Honestly, the big issue here was that the users of their site were effected by these people. These reparations, therefore, should be somehow "given back to the community". I don't care if it's divided up and sent to users, or if it's just used to improve the site overall. The point is, that money should be pocketed by NO ONE.
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