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Spammer Looses $711 Million To Facebook

Late last week, a San Jose, California judge awarded Facebook $711 million.  This comes after Sanford Wallace, a spammer who had hacked into users profile,  posted phony wall post and messages to those users friends.  In March of this year, Wallace along with Adam Arzoomanian and Scott Shaw had all been sued and had been put on a restraining order by Facebook.  The restraining order was put into place, so that if any of three hacked into Facebook again, they will be thrown into jail immediately.

According to the California Federal Court, Wallace did not appear for the court hearing on September 18 and alas awarded Facebook the $711 million judgement last week.  Sam O’Rourke wrote on Facebook’s blog, “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. Most notably, the judge referred Wallace to the U.S. 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.”

You may recall that in November 2008, Facebook had won it’s first spamming case against Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital.  The two were guilty of sending sleazy messages to users of the social networking site.  Facebook was awarded $873 million, which to date is the largest judgment in history for an action under control of Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM).