Tech & Biz

Judge Kicks Notorious Spammer Off Facebook

by Blue Crush | March 3, 2009 at 07:03 pm

161 views | 26 Recommendations | 5 comments

A judge in California on Monday ordered convicted spammer Sanford 'Spamford' Wallace to stay away from Facebook. Wallace is accused of flooding Facebook users with unsolicited messages, which appear to come from friends, and rerouting traffic to phishing sites.

Facebook sued Wallace and two other men last week in an effort to cut down on spam and phishing schemes on the social-networking site.

Wallace's spamming career dates back to the 1990s. Last spring he was ordered to pay MySpace US$230M for running a similar operation on that site.

Unfortunately, spam is just one of several problems plaguing Facebook these days.

Over the past few days, Facebook users have also been hit with a new variant of the Koobface worm, which tries to trick victims into installing malicious software onto their PCs. Also, fake applications that send out messages such as "F a c e b o o k - closing down!!!" or "Error Check System" to try to trick victims into sending the messages to their friends have also been circulating around the social network.

Source: itworld.com

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Amy Judd

at 19:17 on March 3rd, 2009

Wow - thank goodness for that.

Paschen

at 19:15 on March 4th, 2009

I wish he did the same to stop other SPAM as well.

Art_By_Alida

at 22:28 on March 4th, 2009

I wonder how "Spamford" did that? If someone like him can write programs to spam on Facebook, just think of what other people could do to hotmail and the other free email services who are getting bombarded with porno spam?

Sheesh...he doesn't look like he is capable of spelling his name, much less writing a complicated software hacking program...

René

at 06:14 on March 5th, 2009

Did he pay up?

Blue Crush

at 07:08 on March 5th, 2009

It's doubtful, it's up to MySpace owners to go after him. But they say it deters other Spammers.

“Anybody who’s been thinking about engaging in spam are going to say, ‘Wow, I better not go there,’” MySpace’s chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, told The Associated Press."