MySpace has won a $234 million legal judgment over spam messages sent to members of the social networking site.
MySpace won the judgment after spammers Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines failed to appear in court. The judgment is believed to be the largest ever awarded in a spam email case.
Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace’s chief security officer, said in a statement,”MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site. The Federal District Court in Los Angeles awarded MySpace $233,777,500 under the federal CAN-SPAM Act and $1,500,000 under the California anti-phishing statute.”
“User engagement is up 32 percent year over year while spam is significantly decreasing, proving efforts like this are working. We thank the court for serving justice upon defendants Wallace and Rines and we remain committed to punishing those who violate the law and try to harm our members.”
The two spammers created MySpace accounts and stole passwords from existing accounts and then spammed members. MySpace says the pair sent as many as 735,925 messages. The messages usually asked recipients to view a video or visit a Web site.
In court papers, MySpace said the spam cost it money and caused complaints from hundreds of users. The company also said that some of the Web sites were pornographic and could potentially cause harm to its younger users.
John Levine of the anti-spam advocacy group Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email thinks MySpace will have a challenging time collecting the money.
“The giant judgments are all defaults, which means they don’t necessarily even know how to find the spammer,” Levine told the BBC.
