Sanford Wallace, the famous spammer known to the internet as the "Spam King," is about to serve jail time after a court sentenced him for criminal contempt of court and electronic mail fraud.
The judge's sentence reads that Wallace has to spend two years and a half in prison and pay restitutions in value of $310,628.55.
The man faced accusations of creating Facebook accounts that allowed him to pellet users with 27 million spam messages between 2008 and 2009. The flood of messages was part of a PPC scam.
The contempt of court charges refer to Wallace's disregard for an anterior court order, which denied him access to Facebook, regardless of method. The order was issued after the social media company took him to court on the CAN-SPAM act.
The man has a vast history of using spam, which stretches to a time when the internet was a mere rumor.
The Spam King started his activity in the late 1980s, when he would send junk email faxes. He eventually stopped, as the practice was outlawed in 1991.
When technology became more versatile, Wallace started to pellet official emails from AOL and Compuserve, which resulted in lawsuits from both companies.
He then fed spam to MySpace users before fixing his gaze on Facebook.
Wallace pleaded guilty in 2015 to one count of fraud and related activity in connection with electronic mail.
According to a report from NBC News, Wallace owned more than 1,500 fake internet domain names and gained illicit access to about 500,000 Facebook accounts. Over a three-month period, he spammed said accounts with 27 million unsolicited ads.
In the ads, the targets were urged to log into a website that would force them to divulge their Facebook username and password. After it pulled the information from them, users were sent to an affiliate website that paid Wallace for the traffic.
One thing to keep in mind about Wallace's case is that the man was not short of luck. His maximum sentence read 16 years in prison and a stacked penalty of $1 billion in fines. There is a high chance that the sum will never be recovered by the authorities.
Sentencing a spammer as reputed as Wallace to jail time should discourage similar activity, at least in the United States.
Not only will the man have to serve 30 months in jail and pay the aforementioned restitution, but he was also ordered to undertake mental health treatment. What is more, he must spend five years of probation after his release.
A Symantec report from last year showed that the number of email spams, email-based malware and phishing attempts were on a downward trend. Read all about it in our coverage to see why.
