Apparently, there’s this guy named Sanford Wallace. He is the “Spam King”. Which has to be like the third or fourth shoddiest nickname in the history of the world. (None of the worse ones come to mind right now, but feel free to point them out.) Anyway, Wallace’s “thing” is to spam people.
And he is that asshole behind all of your friends posting lewd and/or annoying penile extension and ringtone messages on your myspace account. Now, besides the fact that all these people are absolute idiots for being dumb enough to click and then get their account taken over, he still causes a massive headache for Tom and the rest of the sweet, sweet winners at the Space. Not as big as Zuckerman dominating his face — pun intended — but still a huge pain in the ass.
So much so, that a court awarded Myspace $230 million, after Wallace and his partner, Wallace Rines, were no-shows in court.
According to court documents, Wallace and Rines distributed 735,925 messages during the scam and earned over $500,000 in the process. The spam campaign caused hundreds of complaints and a big headache for MySpace, especially since the spam indiscriminately sent pornography links to minors as well as adults.
The federal judge in the case fined the spam partners the maximum amount under the law. CAN-SPAM allows for fines of $100 per message and that number can be tripled for particularly abusive practices. The pair were fined $163.4 million under two parts of CAN-SPAM, Rines was singled out for an extra $63.4 million, $1.5 million was for violating California’s anti-phishing laws. Rines and Wallace were also ordered to pay another $4.7 million for incurred legal fees.
Go figure right? A high tech con artist named “The Spam King” (it’s like the internet version of “The Wiz” from Seinfeld) doesn’t show up in court. Let us know when you start collecting that Tom: msypace.com/brahsomerulez4eva
