9 ms·
Facebook ‘Spam King’ Guilty for Sending 27M Messages
- georgeglue1 11y agoIs 27 million messages a lot? I'm not sure if this is a testament to how good facebook is at fighting spam, or a media error.
- ProAm 11y agoNot really when their user base is over 1 billion.
- chronic40 11y ago1.5 billion apparently
- felixhandte 11y agoIn 2009 we had 1b sends/day, so not really: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/chat-reaches-1-billion-messages-sent-per-day/91351698919 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/chat-rea...
- hammock 11y agoHe gained access to 500k accounts... so I'm roughly guessing that he sent a message to every friend people had on each one of those accounts.
- boomzilla 11y agoYeah, that bit of information is more interesting. Did he get the access illegally? Why was that not a crime, but sending the messages was? Something is off here.
- Sanddancer 11y agoHim getting access was the fraud part of the charges. The spamming was covered under the contempt part, because he was under court orders to not use facebook due to prior spamming.
- sydneyliu 11y agoFacebook's usually really good about fighting spammers and multiple accounts from what I've seen. Early community was facebook was filled with spammers but it's much harder to find spam accounts nowadays. Basically every account I encounter is real....I wonder what crazy thing he had to do to get 500k spam accounts
- brokentone 11y agoIt doesn't say they're spam accounts -- more likely good accounts taken over, which accounts for some of the fraud.
- SN76477 11y agoI made a nice bit of money spamming those early community pages. . . Ahh yes the good 'ole days.
- wpietri 11y agoThe technical term is not "made", but something more like "stole". If you put $1 in your pocket while wasting $10 (or, more likely, $100 or $1000) of other people's time, then you're not a productive citizen, you're a parasite.
- andrewpi 11y agoSanford Wallace is quite famous for his spamming history for those who remember the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_Wallace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_Wallace
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoBy far the most intriguing was Davis Wolfgang Hawke, the "spam Nazi", subject of the 2004 book Spam Kings.
- amyjess 11y agoThe most bizarre part of this article: > As of October 2003, Wallace was working as a DJ in New Hampshire, making weekly appearances at area nightclubs. Wallace performs under the name DJ MasterWeb. Spam King by day, club DJ by night. With a cringey name, to boot.
- FilterSweep 11y ago> In 2001 he was linked to a website, passthison.com, which utilized multiple-window launching to snag Web viewers, an advertising practice rarely seen outside of the online pornography industry. It's funny how 2001 bad spyware practices used only on porn sites have been utilized by mainstream media sites via iOS/Android browser redirects in 2015.
- fein 11y agoWell, porn sites figured out it was bad for business. The demographic targeted for these spam messages easily falls for the same tricks, but aren't getting any services in exchange; only a faceless company. Credit card farmers don't really care about repeat business, same goes for the brain pill trial guys that people for some reason give their CC info willingly. If someone catches on, you just bring up another llc, rinse, and repeat.
- pjc50 11y agoNo, we got popup blocking built into browsers about a decade ago. Similarly, intrusive advertising is driving flashblocking and indeed total ad-blocking. (Currenltly struggling with the fact that Plume for Android is nice to use - except when ads bounce you out of the app without being clicked on, sometimes over and over again)
- bhouston 11y agoNow we need to go after the robocall spammers. They waste so much time of so many people -- worse that email spammers. I swear they are doing +1B of spam calls per month in North America.
- bduerst 11y agoApparently there were 214,000 people who complained about robo callers to the FCC last year. If you think about how obscure that reporting process is and extrapolate to the real number, you're probably not that far from the truth.
- bhouston 11y agoI get one or more a day but then again I have a business line with a Google listing. I started to use the whitepages caller Id all to block known slammers - it is pretty good.
- wanderingstan 11y agoI've complained and was appalled at how obtuse the process is. (E.g. the FCC requires that you include hyphens in phone numbers, the Do-not-call list won't allow numbers with hyphens.) I've thought of making an app to automate the process. It would remember all form's entries for you (name, address, etc) and fill in the current time and date. You'd just have to copy the phone number. Think there's any demand for this?
- joelberman 11y agoAnd then they thank you for reporting, tell you that they cannot handle individual complaints, and close the case. If they fixed the problem they could handle more difficult cases.
- srtjstjsj 11y agoThe real number is obviously "every phone number".
- Someone1234 11y ago
- amyjess 11y agoWow, I didn't know Spamford was even still around. I still remember the hundreds of cyberout.com emails I'd get from his company back when I used AOL around 1995.
- interesting_att 11y agoWas this man prosecuted primarily because of his notorious history? I have never heard of FB spammers being prosecuted before.
- danielweber 11y agoHoly crap, it's Spamford. I totally lost track of him for years, but this is his one-trick pony. He knows nothing else besides how to send spam, and will do it no matter what he has to break into to do it. Very obsessed.
- lpsz 11y agoFor those who don't know, this fellow was famous as early as the 90s [1]. If he returns to spamming again and again, doesn't it mean that the punishment is lesser than the gains to be had? And too bad. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_Wallace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_Wallace
- bitJericho 11y agoIt also means that eventually the courts will throw the book at him XD
- untog 11y agoThe evidence suggests otherwise.
- bitJericho 11y agoDid you and I read the same thing? He's looking at jail time.
- skimpycompiler 11y agoPff, 250 and 700 million dollars. That seems ridiculously large for a petty spamming crime. At least he filed bankruptcy.
- sparaker 11y agoAnybody know how was he spamming? Using wall or messages?
- chatmasta 11y agoWait, so what was the actual crime? Violating a court order forbidding any access to Facebook? Was he charged under CANSPAM? Or CFAA (was he phishing real accounts?) I'm confused how this turned into a criminal case.
- dredmorbius 11y agoViolating a court order forbidding any access to Facebook? Yes, as stated in the article. "Spamford" Wallace has a slight history, including multiple instances of recidivism after former spamming episodes dating to 1991. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_Wallace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_Wallace In the late 1990s, his company, Cyber Promotions, aka Cyberpromo, was widely blacklisted as a source of unsolicited email. Wallace's high-profile pro-spam stance and unrepentant persistence earned him the derisive nickname 'Spamford'. Prior to his email spam ventures, Wallace had gained notoriety in other questionable marketing circles, as a heavy utilizer of junk fax marketing, a practice outlawed in the United States since 1991.[2] In 1995, Wallace formed Cyber Promotions, entering the spam market. Thanks to a self-marketing campaign, Cyberpromo rapidly became the most successful seller of email marketing—as well as the number one source of unsolicited email. After Cyberpromo failed to become a legitimate business, Wallace returned to junk faxing in late 1997.[2]
- chatmasta 11y agoSo why is violating a court order not to access Facebook considered criminal contempt, not civil contempt?
- 55555 11y agoI read previously that he is charged criminally for hacking the 100,000-500,000 accounts. They were real accounts which belonged to real people and he may have phished them.
- tedunangst 11y agoWho said it was criminal contempt and not civil contempt?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]