Spam King Sanford Wallace has turned himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Wallace is facing multiple counts of fraud and related activity and has been charged with three counts of intentional damage to a protected computer and two counts of criminal contempt. Wallace, who is notorious in spam circles and has been advocating for spam since the 1990s, ran a phishing scam through Facebook that resulted in more than 27 million spam messages.
Wallace was released on $100,000 bail. In 2009 Facebook sued Wallace for his part in spam messages on Facebook and was awarded a $711 million settlement. Most recently, Wallace has been seen on Google Plus where the majority of his pictures and posts are from nightclubs. He currently lists his occupation as “nightclub business / poker” and Google Plus lists his current residence as Las Vegas.
Wallace was banned from Facebook, which court documents show he violated by creating a fake profile and logging into Facebook on a Virgin airlines flight from Las Vegas to New York. Wallace also violated the ban by creating a profile called David Sinful-Saturdays Fredericks that was active from Jan. 26 to Feb. 16, 2011.
Wallace started his reign as the self-styled Spam King in the mid-1990s when he formed a company called Cyber Promotions (Cyberpromo) that was one of the first companies on the Internet to be widely blacklisted for sending unsolicited emails. The company was dissolved shortly thereafter. In 2004 the Federal Trade Commission filed suit against Wallace alleging that his new company put spyware on users’ computers and then offered to fix the problem for a fee. The FTC filed suit again in 2006 and ordered Wallace in his associates to pay more than $5 million in fees.
Wallace turned to social networks a year later and was sued by MySpace in 2007 for phishing and spamming by creating 11,000 or so profiles that attempted to push users to porn and gambling websites. A judge fined Wallace $230 million after he did not show for a court date in 2008.
Contacted on Google Plus and then on email, Wallace said “I can’t comment on any of this at this exact moment but I will be asking my attorney if I can send out a general comment in the next day or so.”
Wallace’s first post on Google Plus came on July 11, about two weeks after the initial invite only rollout of the service. His first post was “I am allowed to use this service.” Of which, the first comment was “for now lol jkjk.”
Sanford goes by the name DJ MasterWeb and was a disc jockey in Rochester, New Hampshire during the early 2000s. He is also known as “Spamford.”
