MySpace is cashing in on the war against spam.
The social network site says it has won $234 million in damages, the largest judgment ever issued in a spam case, from the man known as the “Spam King.”
A Los Angeles judge ruled in MySpace’s favor when the “King,” also known as Sanford Wallace , didn’t show up for a hearing this week. Another man named in the case, Walter Rines, neglected to show as well.
The two men are accused of stealing passwords and using hacked MySpace accounts to email hundreds of thousands of messages trying to get people to visit their web site. That web site, MySpace says, was just a money-making scheme. Court documents show it worked, too: The pair scored nearly half a million dollars from the process. Amazing.
The 2003 CAN-SPAM federal anti-spam law provides a minimum of $100 in damages for each violation. Legal experts do say, though, that it’s often hard for companies to actually collect all the money, and sometimes it doesn’t ever happen.
As for Wallace, this isn’t his first time in hot water. Time Warner and AOL took him on several years ago, then in 2006, he was slapped with a $4 million fine for propagating spyware.
