Notorious spammer Sanford Wallace, better known by his self-proclaimed nickname of “spam king,” is going to jail after being found guilty of electronic mail fraud and criminal contempt of court.

Wallace was sentenced to 30 months in prison and ordered to pay $310,628.55 in restitution according to local reports.

Sanford stood accused of hacking into Facebook accounts and sending 27 million spam messages throughout 2008 and 2009 as a part of a PPC scam.

The contempt of court charge related to Wallace ignoring a previous court order; Facebook had previously filed a lawsuit against him under the CAN-SPAM act which resulted in an order that forbid him access Facebook in any manner, which he subsequently broke several weeks later.

Wallace’s history as the “Spam King” predates the commercial internet and started in the late 1980s when he would send junk email faxes until the law banned the practice in 1991.

Wallace first rose to prominence in the mid-1990s when his company, Cyber Promotions, bombarded email boxes on AOL and Compuserve; both companies subsequently sued him for the practice.

He later moved on to spamming MySpace users, before targeting Facebook.

According to the indictment, Wallace established over 1,500 fake Internet domain names and then illegally obtained access to around 500,000 Facebook accounts where he then sent 27 million unsolicited ads disguised as friend posts over a three-month span.

The unsolicited ads encouraged those targeted to log into a website that would trick them into divulging their Facebook username and password before directing them to an affiliate website that paid him for the traffic; Wallace then continued spamming away using the credentials he gathered.

Lucky

If anything can be taken from the sentencing of Wallace is that he is actually fairly lucky: he was facing up to 16 years in prison, and still to this day owes potentially up to $1 billion in fines from his previous appearances in court, amounts which are believed to remain unpaid.

That said, any imprisonment of a spammer the size of Wallace is still a better outcome than no jail time at all, and although it won’t stop the global spamming industry, it certainly will cause spammers based in the United States to at least note that if they are caught, they can be locked up.

In addition to his jail time, Wallace was ordered to undertake mental health treatment and will have to serve five years of probation once he’s released.

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