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That Oughta Teach Him! US Court Hits 'Spam King' With Two Years in Prison

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An American man who sent millions of spam messages over five months was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison by a court in California.

Las Vegas resident Sanford Wallace — aka "Spamford" or "Spam King" — Wallace received the sentence on Monday (June 13), and was also ordered  him to pay US$310,628.55 in damages. Last year he had pleaded guilty to one count of fraud.

According to the prosecutors, Wallace had devised "a scheme from approximately November 2008 through March 2009 to send spam messages to Facebook users that compromised approximately 500,000 legitimate Facebook accounts, and resulted in over 27 million spam messages being sent through Facebook's servers."

A skillful hacker, Wallace managed to earn money from spam by sending thousands of fraudulent messages and emails that redirected users to websites he was affiliated with — the higher the websites' traffic, the larger Wallace's profit.

Previous civil lawsuits brought forward by Facebook, Myspace and other tech companies had resulted in almost US$1 billion of outstanding default judgements — which were never paid. In 2011, though, he was hit with criminal charges (fraud) for the first time.

While a prison sentence for spamming can seem a little harsh, the prosecutors explained it was the only way to wean Wallace off his malicious practices.  

"The defendant's history demonstrates that he has yet to suffer a consequence — other than a default judgment that cannot be collected — for his spamming activities," they wrote in a memorandum.

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