from the i'll-have-your-spam-i-love-it dept
If you've followed the spam/scam space for a while, you know the story of Sanford "Spamford" Wallace -- the original big name spammer. He was proud of what he did, though eventually claimed to shut down and go legit, even trying to run a night club for a while. However, the allure of questionable internet marketing activities proved to be too strong, and before long he was back on track, this time in the spyware business. Eventually, the FTC fined him $4 million, though, they apparently drastically lowered the amount when he showed hardship. A year ago, it was discovered that soon after this settlement with the FTC, Wallace went right back to spyware distribution using MySpace. The FTC doesn't seem nearly as inclined to cut Wallace any slack this time around, as it's filed contempt charges against Wallace, demanding that he hand over all of the profits from his MySpace scamming. The filing reveals more details that show just how scammy Wallace was on MySpace. He didn't just set up 11,000 fake profiles, as mentioned in the original filing, but he also used phishing techniques to get other users' logins, and then used the logins to spam other MySpace pages with comments. On top of that, he installed software to make it quite difficult to delete those comments. All this effort paid off, apparently earning Wallace $555,850 in just six months.
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