MySpace wins $230m judgment over spam
NEW YORK - Popular online hangout MySpace has won a $230 million judgment over junk messages sent to its members in what may be the largest such award yet.
A Los Angeles federal judge ruled against a notorious "Spam King," Sanford Wallace, and his partner, Walter Rines, after the two failed to show up at a court hearing, MySpace said yesterday.
Wallace earned the monikers "Spam King" and "Spamford" as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s. He left that company, Cyber Promotions, following lawsuits from Internet service providers, only to re-emerge in a spyware case that led to a $4 million federal judgment against him in 2006.
Rines and Wallace created their own MySpace accounts or took over existing ones by stealing passwords through "phishing" scams, said Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's chief security officer.
They then e-mailed other MySpace members, he said, "asking them to check out a cool video or another cool site. When you [got] there, they were making money trying to sell you something or making money based on hits or trying to sell ring tones."
MySpace said the pair sent more than 730,000 messages to MySpace members, many made to look like they were coming from trusted friends, giving them an air of legitimacy. Under the 2003 federal antispam law known as CAN-SPAM, each violation entitles MySpace to $100 in damages, tripled when conducted "willfully and knowingly."
