MySpace Wins $230 Million Judgment Against Sanford Wallace 160
smooth wombat writes "Apparently some people just don't take the hint. The latest story in the Sanford Wallace spamming saga is a $230 million verdict against Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, when they failed to show up in court.
Wallace and Rines were accused by MySpace of creating their own accounts and taking over other accounts through phishing scams, and then using those accounts to send out bogus emails to other members. The emails sent would indicate a video or web site but when people would go to the link, the two would make money through the number of hits generated or they would try to sell something such as ring tones.
According to MySpace, the pair sent over 730,000 emails to members which resulted in bandwidth and delivery-related costs as well as complaints from hundreds of members. The 2003 CAN-SPAM Act allows MySpace to collect $100 per violation or triple that amount when the spam is sent 'willfully and knowingly.'"
From His Blog (Score:4, Informative)
"I just read that a court awarded MySpace a $234 million dollar judgment against me. Thatâ(TM)s pretty amazing since I havenâ(TM)t even been served in this case since the preliminary injunction about a year ago. Regardless, the checkâ(TM)s in the mail."
Judgment (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Excite.com? I remember them! (Score:5, Informative)
That's OK. We all thought Sanford "Spamford" Wallace [wikipedia.org] and Walt "Picklejar" Rines were out of business as of ten years ago [news.com]. Those two motherfuckers (and I already have lawyers from the Oedipus Complex Anti-Defamation Leage calling on line one for my slur against people who fuck their mothers) have been spamming in one form or another since before excite.com even started. Here's a snapshot [keithlynch.net] of the spam wars, circa 2001. Look
Walt Rines' nickname of Pickle Jar [google.com] comes from news.admin.net-abuse.email, and he was dubbed thusly by one of the Elder Gods of Spamfighting, the immortal Bill Mattocks. The USENET thread to which I just linked was the one in which what had been widely known for some time was finally proven -- that every time a spammer says he's going to "remove you from his list", he's lying. (Following the FTC hearings, most of the major spammers of the day, including Spamford and Pickle Jar, were touting a "universal remove list" as the solution -- unbeknownst to the spammers, the list was seeded with never-used email addresses, and unsurprisingly, those never-used email addresses immediately started receiving spam.)