Spam Lawsuit Yields Facebook Hefty Compensation

A Northern California federal district court awarded Facebook a sum of $711 Million from Sanford Wallace as compensation for damages he did to the website by sending e-mails and adding wall posts. Using e-mails and wall posts, Wallace asked visitors to provide their e-mail IDs, as reported by Venture Beat on October 29, 2009.

Online security specialists said - Jeremy Fogel, Judge of the federal district court, granted support to Facebook's plea to get an early judgment against Wallace who allegedly breached the Can-Spam Act that prohibited misleading and false marketing e-mails, as reported by Digital Media on October 29, 2009.

According to Fogel, Wallace deliberately violated restraining order and initial restrictions issued during the prosecution. Consequently, he forwarded the case as criminal contempt to the Office of US Attorney for further prosecution.

Wallace is nicknamed "spam king" and "Spamford" because he played the role of chief of a company namely 'CyberPromotions,' which dispatched a huge 30 Million spam mails daily during the 1990s. The spammer had earlier faced lawsuits from the Federal Trade Commission and companies like Concentric Network and AOL. During May 2006, a US federal court ordered Wallace and his firm 'Smartbot.net' to deposit $4.1 Million.

Facebook is unlikely to receive the entire compensation settled in the case since Wallace declared himself bankrupt in June 2009. Despite that, he has to serve prison since judge Fogel suggested that Wallace must be tried in connection with committing criminal contempt.

Sam O'Rourke, Facebook's lawyer, said that while the company wasn't expecting to get most of the compensation money, it hoped that the settlement would continuously deter the criminals, as reported by Venture Beat on October 29, 2009.

Further, in March 2009, Facebook was awarded a restriction order against 3 spam mailers who had distributed unsolicited e-mails and posted abusive messages on the social networking website. The tentative order for restrain imposed criminal outcomes against the continuing actions of the spammers.

Eventually, the specialists remarked that the current judgment of awarding financial restitution and the compensation figure announced would hopefully deter potential spammers in future.

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

» SPAMfighter News - 11/7/2009