 On Tuesday, Associated Press reported that top social networking website MySpace.com recently won a lump sum of $234 million in what is being called “the largest anti-spam award ever.” Audrey B. Collins, the U.S. District Judge in Los Angeles, fined Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines $157.4 million for sending out spam messages through MySpace; $63.4 million was fined specifically against Rines and an additional $1.5 million against both for violating the Californian anti-phishing law. In order to spam registered members, Wallace and Rines created their own free profiles on MySpace; AP reports that they also hacked into unsuspecting member accounts by stealing their passwords. From there, they were able to contact users through private messages and wall posts, often enticing them to “check out a cool video or another cool site.” Hacking into existing accounts was particularly sneaky; it allowed the duo to send messages to users under a familiar guise. This meant that members, seeing messages from who they thought were registered MySpace friends, often clicked through to spam sites unaware that they were being duped. Furthermore, Wallace and Rines collected significant revenue from PPC links to bogus sites selling ring tones and the like.
The team sent a total of 735,925 messages to MySpace members, AP reported. Rines and Wallace are considered “two of the Internet's most prominent spam defendants.” Wallace, also referred to as "Spamford" and the "spam king," formerly headed up a spam company which reportedly distributed over “30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s.” However, the two did not appear at the court hearing during which the fines were formally presented. Sources are calling this lawsuit a “big victory for MySpace.” But John Levine, working with the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, contends that "the giant judgments are all defaults, which means they don't necessarily even know how to find the spammer.” AP mentioned that Wallace was unlisted in the phone directory and Rines’ numbers had been disconnected. If authorities can’t track down the spammers, MySpace might not see any of the cash. Whether or not they are repaid for the inconveniences their users endured, the social networking website is taking the matter very seriously. Chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam stated that “MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on [the] site.”
Personally, I received about five or six spam posts on my MySpace profile from people I thought were friends… little did I know they were the results of spammers like Wallace and Rines. Lately I’ve been bothered by the page I’m redirected to when I leave MySpace via a link in a comment, but now I’ll take into consideration that it’s just one more friendly precaution to protect me from viruses and scams. |
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