US man charged over Facebook spam turns himself in

[gamingmaster42]

A US man charged with sending more than 27 million spam messages to Facebook users has turned himself in.

Sanford Wallace, who is known as the "Spam King", surrendered to FBI agents in California.

Prosecutors allege he developed a program that breached Facebook spam filters and lured users to submit their account details.

Mr Wallace denies the charges, which carry prison sentences of up to 10 years.

He has been released on $100,000 (£61,000) bail.

Prosecutors say Mr Wallace's program posted messages on Facebook users walls - purportedly from friends - urging users to visit a website where their account details were then harvested.

They were then redirected to an affiliate website that earned Wallace "substantial revenue", the charges say.

The program also retrieved lists of Facebook users' friends and posted spam messages on their walls, the indictment adds.

About 500,000 Facebook accounts were compromised between November 2008 and March 2009, leading to more than 27 million spam messages being sent, prosecutors said.

Mr Wallace, who is from Las Vegas, is charged with six counts of electronic mail fraud, three counts of intentional damage to a protected computer and two counts of criminal contempt.

Facebook sued Mr Wallace in 2009 and a federal judge ordered him not to access Facebook's computer network. However, prosecutors say he repeatedly violated that order earlier this year.

Mr Wallace also lost a civil case brought against him by MySpace in 2008 over junk messages sent to members of the social networking site.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14428730

[Cecil15]

LOL, I didn't know that spamming would cost someone such a big amount! A hundred dollars is big enough for me, what more for a hundred thousand! Well, I guess Mr. Wallace just got what he deserves. And good thing he stopped himself from doing such useless things.

[OmarFW]

Wow. It's people like this that I just want to punch in the face.

Spam is the worst part of the internet experience. It's bad enough that we have a ton of nigerians creating bad phishing scams.

[gamingmaster42]

I especially hate FaceBook spam because it just multiplies over time. It takes one idiot to spread the harm to multiple people.

[MyDigitalpoint]

Well, Facebook has not only turned into a spam source but it's being a platform to spread all kind of weirdos thoughts.

You see those "parties" that gather hundreds and thousands of people just to cause mess around or those pages inviting "friends" to join ridiculous manifestations of anger, joy or whatever.

At least this story is showing that something can go wrong when doing wrong things.

[neverforget98]

Sad the way people make money. This is pretty pathetic, and I get tired myself of those spam messages. Some of us are smarter than others not to click the links, but some people (no offense to those people), are not so computer smart, and they think the link is just fine, until they lose their account, and a lot of people keep personal information in their accounts, especially when inboxing other members.

[OhioTom76]

Not to play devils advocate, but if the users voluntarily clicked through his facebook app, annoying as it may be what exactly did he do here that was technically illegal and/or different from what facebook itself does, as well as many other advertisers on there?

[HiddenKnowledge]

Not to play devils advocate, but if the users voluntarily clicked through his facebook app, annoying as it may be what exactly did he do here that was technically illegal and/or different from what facebook itself does, as well as many other advertisers on there?

Prosecutors allege he developed a program that breached Facebook spam filters and lured users to submit their account details.

So pretty much, he made a site that looked like Facebook and asked them for their login codes, then he used those to spam other users with the same url. Then he send them to a url that gained him money when people visited it.

That way, he made a lot of money.