Facebook presented $711 million on winning a spam lawsuit

October 29, 2009 - 10:34 pm | 36 views

Technology.am (Oct 29, 2009) — Facebook was granted $711 million in compensation in a ruling Thursday in opposition to self-described “spam king” Sanford Wallace.

Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California settled Facebook’s submission for a defaulting decision against Wallace for violations of the Can-Spam Act, which forbids “fake and deceptive” advertising e-mails. Fogel too found that Wallace “deliberately dishonored” a provisional warning order and prelude restriction issued in the case and referred the issue to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for trial of criminal disapproval.

“The evidence demonstrates that Wallace deliberately violated the statutes in problem with obvious disrespect for the rights of Facebook and the thousands of Facebook users whose accounts were compromised by his behavior,” Fogel wrote in his judgment order, which also enduringly prohibits Wallace from accessing the Facebook Web site or creating a Facebook account, amongst other limitations.

“While we don’t anticipate receiving the huge majority of the reward, we anticipate that this will proceed as a constant prevention against these criminals,” Sam O’Rourke, Facebook’s lead counsel for litigation and intellectual property, wrote in a Facebook blog post. “This is one more significant conquest in our battle against spam. We will persist to follow damages against other spammers.”

Facebook sued Sanford and two others in February alleging they used phishing sites or other way to deceitfully gain entrance to Facebook accounts and used them to dispense phishing spam all through the network.

A year before, Wallace and another defendant were prearranged to pay MySpace.com $234 million subsequent a trial at which Wallace constantly failed to turn over documents or even turn up in court.

Wallace has in the past been sued by the Federal Trade Commission and companies including AOL and Concentric Network. In May 2006, Wallace and his business Smartbot.net were planned by a federal court to turn over $4.1 million.

Wallace earned the nicknames “Spamford” and “spam king” for his past character as head of CyberPromotions, a company accountable for distribution of as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s. In the major ruling in history for a case brought under the Can-Spam Act, the federal court in San Jose awarded Facebook $873 million in compensation late last year in opposition to a Canadian man accused of spamming users of the site.

Photo credit: Jacob Bøtter

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