Spamford facing 40 years in prison

Sanford Wallace, alias the spam king, is now in front of the US Justice System. He is facing up to 40 years in prison and more than 2 million dollars in fines.

At times known by the moniker Spamford, the man who is the self-proclaimed spam king last week fronted the FBI. The 43 year old Sanford Wallace is accused of compromising more than half a million Facebook accounts between November 2008 and March 2009.

Through these hijacked accounts (following a phishing attack) and the creation of others, the man is accused of having sent 27 million spam messages to Facebook users. On Thursday, Sanford Wallace pleaded not guilty to the charges. He is facing up to 40 years in prison and a fine of 2 million dollars. He will now front the court on the 22nd of August.

Facebook had already filed charges against Sanford Wallace, celebrating a decision handed down in October 2009 when the man was ordered to pay 711 million dollars for breaking the American Anti-spam laws. He was subsequently fined 234 million dollars following a similar action filed by MySpace, and 4 million dollars for illegally installing spyware on computers.

Sanford Wallace first started to get a taste for spam in the 1990’s when polluting the email accounts of CompuServe and AOL users. He started his own marketing company - Cyber Promotions, which had the aim of attracting internet users to various sites which would pay depending on the generated traffic.