MySpace sues Spamford Wallace

Gone Phishing

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Spam, 28th March 2007 00:03 GMT

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You've got to admire Sanford Wallace for his persistence. Despite a flurry of lawsuits over the years and his well-deserved status as one of the net's most loathed pariahs, the the self-proclaimed King of Spam is now being sued by MySpace, which alleges he phished user accounts and deceived users into visiting his websites.

The alleged scheme involved setting up 11,000 phony MySpace accounts, groups and forums and spamming thousands of users of the social networking site.

The complaint, filed in the US District Court in Los Angeles, seeks unspecified damages and an injunction forbidding Spamford and his associates from accessing MySpace. It accuses him of violating state and federal laws including the CAN-SPAM Act and anti-spam and anti-phishing statutes in California.

In May, Spamford was ordered to pay $4m after losing a suit brought by the Federal Trade Commission. In that case, he was accused of exploiting IE vulnerabilities so the browser would serve up a barrage of ads and con users into buying anti-spyware programs.

Wallace was among the earliest spammers, coming to prominence in the mid 1990s with a company called Cyber Promotions, which spewed out 1m messages a day. Funny thing, his ISPs kept dumping him, and several of those disputes ended up in court. He ultimately disbanded the outfit and promised to spam no more after facing lawsuits from AOL and CompuServe. ®

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