NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- A California judge awarded Facebook
$711 million in damages against spammer Sanford Wallace for bombarding the Web
site with junk messages.
"We won another battle in the fight against spam," said
Facebook, which announced the Oct. 29 ruling on its Web site on Friday.
Wallace, who has also been called the "Spam King,"
accessed Facebook members' accounts without their permission and sent out
"phony" Wall posts and messages, the company said.
In addition to the damages, Judge Jeremy Fogel of U.S. District
Court in Northern California's San Jose division banned Wallace, and anyone
affiliated with him, from accessing Facebook.
Facebook acknowledged that it doesn't expect to get much money out
of the bankrupt Wallace, but it said that he could end up behind bars.
"Most notably, the judge referred Wallace to the U.S.
Attorney's Office with a request that Wallace be prosecuted for criminal
contempt, which means that in addition to the judgment, he now faces possible
jail time," read the Facebook statement. "We will continue to pursue
damages against other spammers."
Wallace
lives in Las Vegas, according to the court, and a phone message for him was not
immediately returned.
This isn't the first time that Sanford was successfully sued by an
online company. In May, 2008, MySpace won a $230 million judgment against
Wallace for sending junk messages. Wallace was also fined $4 million by the
Federal Trade Commission in 2006 for his excessive pop-up ads.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/30/technology/facebook_spammer/index.htm?postversion=2009103010
2009 November October