Spanking Spam King: Sanford Wallace faces jail for Facebook flood The Las Vegas man known as the "Spam King" is now facing a stretch behind bars after pleading guilty to spamming tens of millions of people on Facebook –despite being legally barred from doing so. Sanford Wallace agreed to a plea deal that reportedly could see him sent down for as long as three years. The deal, agreed to on …
3 years at most huh? This guy really is a boil on the ass of humanity. Sadly he will be making headlines on El Reg again in no time.
He committed two heinous crimes here: not only the spamming itself, but also enabling Facebook to claim its' doing something for the good of humanity. That alone is worth an extra 5 years IMHO.
"The complaint, filed in 2011, alleges that Wallace used an army of 500,000 compromised Facebook.com accounts to make an estimated 30 million unauthorized wall posts on the friends of those commandeered accounts. The scam ran over a five-month period between 2008 and 2009."
FB is a bit of a whopper of a site with one or two subscribers but this bloke managed to wield 0.5 meeelllliiiioooon accounts to make 30 ... lots ... of posts for, hmmm a five month period over a two year period (we can work it out but it looks a bit naff in the article).
I know several people with only one account that can manage to spam on FB at a similar rate. Ironically enough they are somehow classified as "friends" - apparently by me (maybe I was drunk or something).
This isn't the punishment that most spammers get (if anything). Even though it probably effects us all (who among us HASN'T gotten spam), those in law enforcement and the prosecutors don't believe that it is a "priority". So, most of the spammers get off scott free.
In the mean time spam continues to be "profitable" for those involved. While the spammers send out millions of messages, it only takes a few to make it profitable, so they continue to do it, and we continue to live with it. Life goes on.
Obviously this person is intelligent enough to commandeer user accounts, set up spam rings, and adapt to the ever-changing Internet landscape, and yet stupid enough to never, ever stop even when it is clear that the feds have him on autodial.
That's something of a paradox.
and yet stupid enough to never, ever stop even when it is clear that the feds have him on autodial
Who says he's stupid? If he's making sufficient money, and manages to avoid a decent chunk of it being seized, then the risk of (and actual) time spent in chokey is all part of the equation. If you held the law in contempt, I'd wager that you'd have a target level of gains that would justify a certain amount of time behind bars.
If he manages to squirrel away $1m from his vast spam campaign, then that's $330k a year over his three year stretch. I suspect he could well have a much higher average "salary" than most of us.
The people who are stupid are perhaps the feds. If they had a watertight case backed by evidence then they wouldn't need to plea bargain down to such a limp wristed sentence. We all know the moment he's out he'll be at it again, because prison clearly isn't a deterrent:
"Sanford Grobsworth Wallis, you are an habitual criminal, who accepts arrest as an occupational hazard, and presumably accepts imprisonment in the same casual manner".
Give him prison time equal to the time he has cost people.
If it takes, say, five seconds to open, recognise, and zap one of his emails, jail him for those five seconds.
Five seconds for each and every spam email he has sent, for each and every single one of the millions of recipients.
He might just get out before the sun expands to a red giant.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
