back to article Spamford Wallace charged for hacking 500,000 Facebookers

One of the first figures to plaster the internet with millions of spam messages before being driven underground has been criminally charged for hacking some 500,000 Facebook accounts, stealing their personal information, and sending 27 million unwanted advertisements. Sanford Wallace, now 43, first figured out a way to evade …

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  1. David 45

    Not enough

    The phrases "locked up" and "key thrown away" come to mind. Still, might be a deterrent to others, if only their respective governments were to clamp down equally hard.

  2. david 63

    Shirley...

    ...he's looking at jail time...

  3. Tony Barnes

    Why doesn't he have a job?

    Seriously, the guy obviously has at worst some pretty decent skills at finding flaws in systems, why isn't someone employing him for security checking...??

    1. JimC

      > Why doesn't someone employ him?

      Because it would make more sense to employ Genghis Khan as a security guard... Noone needs someone with less morals than a NOTW journalist in their company, let alone with any kind of responsible position. Do you people honestly not know who this low life is?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    You've got to hand it to this guy

    You've got to hand it to this guy, he's pretty dedicated to his cause.

    As to all the assholes saying he should be locked up with the key thrown away : Get a life, all he did was send some adverts which may have been irritating to some people in a minor way.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      You're kidding, right?

      What this guy does costs companies millions of dollars to protect from and clean up after. Every day I have to clean up this sort of shit, and that's *after* my company's email filters have trashed the 90% of mail they can identify as spam. He didn't just spit in someone's beer, he took the sewage truck fleet and sprayed its contents over the city.

      Never mind just locking him up, he should be breaking rocks for the next 20 years, and banned from ever connecting to a network again if he lives long enough to get out.

    2. Frank Bitterlich
      Thumb Up

      ... all this guy did is...

      ... break into peoples' accounts and posted fake messages that appeared to come from the account holders, among other things.

      This guy is not just a nuisance, he is a criminal.

    3. Giles Jones Gold badge

      LOL

      All he did was hack peoples accounts, impersonate them and break the terms and conditions of the site he abused.

      This isn't email he is abusing, this is hacking and abusing a service.

      He could do the same on e-commerce sites and nick your credit card details, would you be so defensive of him if he did?

    4. Acme Fixer
      Pint

      Minor?

      It's not minor when the number of spams he's spewed has more than nine zeros at the end. If you want proof of what I said, you can go back to the journals and see from the number of lawsuits he's lost and hundreds of millions of dollars he owes that this BSFH is in no way, shape, or form a minor spammer. He wasn't given the name King of spam for no reason.

      And here's another fact: if you took all the electricity this BSFH has caused to be wasted on spam and put it on the electric grid, it could power the whole world for a year, if not a decade.

      I learned well from my mother, who told me "I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Throwing the Library...

    Looking at what he's done...

    It's not just shoving out advertising on Facebook...

    He's been hacking into the accounts of other Facebook users.

    And if he's been doing this for adverts, somebody has been paying him to do it. Looks like a criminal conspiracy with the advertisers. Maybe even comes under RICO. Oh, the chances are that the people paying aen't in the USA, and were supplying certain well-known drug products, and were generally as shady as all heck. But if they wewre paying him for this, I wonder how accurate his tax returns are...

    Trouble is, when this sort of creep can get hammered in so many different ways by the Law, why do the bigger crooks get away with so much. And is anyone really safe?

  6. Loyal Commenter Silver badge
    WTF?

    My spidey sense is tingling!

    Do I sense a certain degree of over-zealous moderation on legal grounds? A number of seemingly innocuous non-rabid comments seem to have suddenly vanished...

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. jake Silver badge

      @Loyal Commenter

      Indeed.

      That's Sanford Wallace all over ... He's all about getting HIS message out there, but nobody else is allowed to comment on the subject.

      One of the reasons "marketard" entered the English language ...

  7. Jimbo 6
    Joke

    "He was ordered not to access Facebook or MySpace"

    Prosecuting Attorney : What about Bebo, your Honour ?!!!

    Judge : Meh.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Angel

    No Need for Password on Facebook to post anything...

    He is totally mess up, he used phishing to hack everyone account. Actually in order to post anything on Facebook, you don't need to access their password and username, only what you need is their login email address. If you HACKED somone account, you can be arrested. but I think by passing user account is legal to do instead of hacking... LOL, if you want to know contact me how to by pass facebook account.

  9. Svein Skogen
    Mushroom

    Something is missing here

    He redirected each "clickee" onto a phishing-site. Something in the 10K numbers of them. Why isn't each of these listed as one instance of computing trespass (10 000 * 6 months still is sufficient to make sure he's never freed)?

    //Svein

  10. Joe Zeff
    Mushroom

    What I'd sentence him to for contempt

    If I were the judge, my sentence on the contempt charge would be simple: the sentences for the fraud charges would be served consecutively, not concurrent. And, he would not be allowed access to any computer for any reason until he left prison. That would get him out of our hair for a few decades.

  11. Giles Jones Gold badge

    Net ban?

    Abuse children and you get banned from working with them.

    Abuse the driving laws and you get banned from driving.

    So if you abuse the Internet you should get banned from using it.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What a scumbag

    Sanford should be hung by his balls for a month and then thrown in a black hole for the next 50 years.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    I wonder if the "all he did was"

    posters are the same ones who are demanding Gary Mckinon's head on a platter when "all he did was look around the FBI's and NASA's computers", he certainly didn't spam from them

    1. jake Silver badge

      @AC 00:42

      I don't know, but they have obviously never been in charge of a major email system. They also don't understand the concept of "scale" ...

      As for the so-called "marketers", I wonder where the mind-set of "piss off 7 (or 8) 9s of all my potential customers for a single sale" came from.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    He never hacked me

    Oh wait, I don't expose my personal details on the Internet.

    Of course.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Big Deal

    He caused some electrons to be moved around which had the effect of some people seeing an advert on a monitor, it's hardly the 'crime' of the century.

  16. Acme Fixer
    Devil

    Please?

    It's about time they throw this recidivist in jail. Please? Just throw the key away. Just conveniently lose it - you will be doing the whole world a very big favor. Actually they should give him a video screen. One with an infinite number of channels, each channel only displaying one of his spams. That should (almost) be enough punishment.

    And when he dies, he will suffer eternal damnation for being the worst human being in this world for causing the most hatred.

    The second and third worst are Canter and Siegel.

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