“Spam king” Sanford Wallace has been slapped with a $711 million judgment for spamming Facebook users with emails for dubious products.
A California judge found that Wallace, who used phishing techniques to access Facebook accounts, violated a law against sending “false and misleading” marketing emails.
The judge permanently banned Wallace from accessing Facebook and recommended he be prosecuted for criminal contempt, CNET reports.
Wallace, who filed for bankruptcy in June, may face jail time for violating a restraining order issued during the case.
“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,” a Facebook lawyer wrote in a company blog post.
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.
Tags: facebook, spam, spam king
