Notorious spammer must pay $234 million to MySpace

Sanford Wallace, a.k.a "Spamford Wallace", has been busted again. This time to the record tune of $234 million (£120 million) for bombarding MySpace users with more than 735,000 messages, the Associated Press reports. The judgment is being called a landmark victory for anti-spam crusaders, and it breathes a little respectability into the much maligned piece of American anti-spam legislation, the Can Spam Act of 2003.

MySpace's chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, told AP that Wallace and his business associate Walter Rines created scores of MySpace accounts and hijacked existing users' accounts by stealing their passwords. Once inside, the duo, in some cases masquerading as trusted friends, messaged other users urging them to check out cool new videos or websites, some of which linked to pornographic sites.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Los Angeles ordered Wallace and Rines, who never attended the hearing, to pay $300 per message, the maximum penalty allowed under the Can Spam Act guidelines.

This isn't the first time Wallace has been busted. The US Federal Trade Commission ordered him to pay $4 million in damages for hawking bogus anti-spyware software in 2006, and in the 1990s his former company, Cyber Promotions, was sued by Time Warner's AOL.

While some see it as a day of justice for spam fighters, nobody expects that Wallace will actually pay up. AP had no luck tracking down Wallace at his last known address in Las Vegas, where he went into business of promoting night clubs. He's probably working on a new get-rich-quick scheme to pay off his legal tab.