(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — A California court has ordered a web marketer to pay social networking site Facebook (www.facebook.com) more than $700 million in damages for hijacking accounts to send spam.
According to court documents, a San Jose court awarded Facebook $711 million in damages to be paid by Sanford Wallace, one of the spammers who accessed people’s accounts without their permission and sent phony wall posts and messages. The court found that Wallace willfully violated the Facebook terms of use with “blatant disregard” for the rights of Facebook and thousands of its users whose accounts he compromised.
“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,” wrote Sam O’Rourke, one of Facebook’s legal representatives in the case. “Most notably, the judge referred Wallace to the US Attorney’s Office with a request that Wallace be prosecuted for criminal contempt, which means that in addition to the judgment, he now faces possible jail time. This is another important victory in our fight against spam. We will continue to pursue damages against other spammers.”
Facebook filed a lawsuit against Wallace, Adam Arzoomanian, and Scott Shaw in February for a phishing and spamming scheme that compromised the accounts of a substantial number of Facebook users. Since November 2008, they sent out emails to multiple Facebook users, which appear to be legitimate messages and ask the recipients to click on a link to a phishing site designed to trick users into divulging their Facebook login information. Once users divulge the information, they would then use it to send spam to the the users’ friends, eventually snowballing to compromise thousands of accounts.
In May 2008, Wallace was found guilty of violating the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (better known as the “CAN-SPAM Act”), and ordered to pay $230 million for spamming and phishing on MySpace.
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