Infamous Spammer Sandford Wallace Busted Again

Filed in archive Spam News on January 31, 2008

Infamous spammer Sanford Wallace has been busted again-this time for using Myspace to spread his spam and spyware. Wallace began his spamming career more than a decade ago, resulting in lawsuits from AOL, CompuServe, and Earthlink. As a result he agree to stop spamming but ultimately did not. He closed his company, Cyber Promotions, but later started a new one called odysseus Marketing with some partners.



In 2005 the FTC sued them for deceptive and unfair practices, which included stealth installations of spyware, sued Wallace and his cohorts, pop up ads, and browser hijacking. Part of the settlement that suspended $1.65 million of the $1.75 million judgement against them included their agreement to abide by a long list of prohibitions including the requirement to obtain consent before downloading anything to users computers and refraining from exploiting software vulnerabilities.

This newest charge from the FTC alledges Wallace created more than 11,000 fake profiles on MySpace and used to them flood legit users with spam. He also ran a phishing operation that netted him unauthorized access to over 300,000 more accounts, which he then used to comment spam, leaving nearly 900,000 comments spamming his websites. This scheme netted him over a cool half million dollars from ad networks.

MySpace sued him last year and got an injunction permanently banning him from the network. The FTC has asked a federal judge to find Wallace and his partners in contempt of their earlier agreement and force them to turn over all profits made from the MySpace scheme.