Notorious Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) spammer Sanford Wallace who also goes by the alias “Spam King” has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison for criminal activities on social media.
Judge Edward Davila passed the sentence against Wallace after he pleaded guilty to allegations that he hacked more than half a million Facebook accounts in 2008 and 2009 through a phishing scam. Wallace was also accused of using the hacked accounts to post spam links to the Facebook walls of friends to the users that were hacked. The report indicated that the Spam King automated the links and received payments from websites that he directed the traffic to through unknowing users.
Judge Davila also added a five-year probation to the sentence which will commence once the Spam King has served his jail time. He will not be allowed to use a computer during the probation period unless he is granted authorization by his probation officer. Wallace is said to have started spamming long before Facebook as a decade earlier he launched a company called Cyber Promotions which used to send more than 30 million spam emails on a daily basis.
Prior to that, he had been sending junk faxes which ended up causing congestion on phone lines. People complained to the authorities because it cost them a lot of money in terms of paper and toner. This led to the formation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 which shut down the opportunities that the Spam King had been using. Not long after that he found more opportunities in the online industry.
Computerworld claims that the Federal judge handling the case could have issued a harsher sentence which would have seen the defendant spend up to 16 years in jail. The jail term will commence on September 7. Wallace was initially supposed to be sentenced in December last year, but his case was delayed.