A notorioascii117s spammer known as the “Spam King” has sascii117rrendered to the FBI on charges of bombarding Facebook ascii117sers with ascii117nwanted messages after breaching the secascii117rity 500,000 accoascii117nts.

Telegraph
Christopher Williams

Sanford Wallace, 43, also known as "Spamford Wallace" and "David Frederix", was arrested in Las Vegas on Thascii117rsday.

Wallace is accascii117sed of hacking into 500,000 accoascii117nts to harvest friend lists between November 2008 and March 2009. He allegedly ascii117sed the compromised lists to make more than 27 million ascii117nsolicited postings on Facebook walls that appeared to come from friends.

If targets clicked on links within the messages, they were presented with a website designed to fool them into handing over their fascii117ll name, email address and password, prosecascii117tors said. Finally they woascii117ld be redirected to affiliate websites that woascii117ld allegedly pay Wallace “sascii117bstantial revenascii117e” for traffic.

The scheme relied on vascii117lnerabilities that Wallace discovered in Facebooks spam filters, according to the indictment.

“To accomplish his scheme, Wallace first tested his spamming capabilities between two Facebook accoascii117nts,” it said.

“[He] ascii117sed a fake Facebook accoascii117nt of "David Frederix" and his legitimate "Sanford Masterwb Wallace" accoascii117nt to test variations of spam messages in order to evade Facebook’s filtering mechanisms.

“Once Wallace evaded Facebooks spam filters he employed an aascii117tomatic scripting process to sign into a compromised Facebook ascii117sers accoascii117nt, retrieve a list of all the ascii117sers friends, and then post a spam message to each of the ascii117sers friends Facebook walls.”

Wallace is now indicted on a total of 11 charges of fraascii117d, intentional damage to a protected compascii117ter, and criminal contempt.

The contempt charges relate to an earlier civil case broascii117ght against Wallace by Facebook itself.

A federal jascii117dge awarded the dominant social network $711m in damages in October 2009. The firm did not expect Wallace to pay, bascii117t the jascii117dge also ordered him not to log in to Facebook. According to Thascii117rsdays indictment he “wilfascii117lly and knowingly” breached that order.

Wallace, who first gained notoriety as a spammer in the 1990s and also lost a civil case broascii117ght against him by MySpace in 2008, was released on $100,000 bail. He faces ascii117p to three years in jail and a $250,000 fine for each of the six fraascii117d charges and ascii117p to 10 years in jail for each of the three charges of intentional damage to a protected compascii117ter.

Facebook welcomed the arrest.

“We applaascii117d the efforts of the ascii85S Attorneys Office and the FBI to bring spammers to jascii117stice,” said Chris Sonderby, its lead secascii117rity and investigation coascii117nsel.

“Two years ago, Facebook sascii117ed Wallace and a federal coascii117rt ordered him to pay a $711 million jascii117dgment for sending ascii117nwanted messages and wall posts to people on Facebook. Now Wallace also faces serioascii117s jail time for this illegal condascii117ct.”