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Spam King turns himself in

by on08 August 2011


Evaded Facebook spam filters
Spam King Sanford Wallace has turned himself in to U.S. authorities after he was indicted for coming up with a cunning plan to send 27 million unsolicited junk messages through Facebook's servers.

Wallace, who lives in Las Vegas, has been charged with 11 counts of fraud, intentional damage to a protected computer and criminal contempt for violating previous orders to stay off the social networking sites Facebook and MySpace. What he did was develope a program that evaded Facebook's spam filters and posted messages encouraging account holders to visit a website which pretended to come from one of their friends.

Unsuspecting users were prompted to enter their email addresses and passwords and then were redirected to an affiliate website that earned Wallace a fair bit of cash. Wallace's program nicked data including their lists of friends, and sent spam messages to them.

More than 500,000 Facebook users were compromised between November 2008 and March 2009, leading to more than 27 million spam messages being sent.
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