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Spamford Must Have Cloned Himself - Right?

by Mark on January 26th, 2008

That’s what I think eh? I mean, who, in their right mind, would defy a court’s permanent injunction (other than a Congressman)?

Or… sub-titled: To Avoid Repaying What You Stole Simply Swear An Inability To Pay!

From The Register; “Spamford Wallace’s MySpace riches come under attack”

“Anybody who says crime doesn’t pay obviously hasn’t talked to Sanford Wallace. In just six months’ time, the prolific purveyor of spam and spyware engineered a scam on MySpace that netted at least $555,850, according to court documents filed this week.”

‘”The contempt defendants repeatedly violated this court’s permanent injunction by downloading computer code to MySpace users without their content, ‘pagejacking’ or redirecting those users to websites that barrage them with advertisements, ‘mousetrapping’ or hindering those users from departing those websites to subject them to more advertisements, and ‘phishing’ for or otherwise capturing users’ personal information without their consent,” the motion reads.’

Wallace and his associate, Walter Rines, having been accused of “deceptive or unfair practices by secretly downloading spyware onto end-users’ machines” in 2006, agreed to fines (and a lengthy list of prohibitions) totaling $1.75 million yet “the court agreed to suspend all but $10,000 of the penalty in light of the defendant’s sworn inability to pay.” Uh huh… so, to be a good boy and comply;

“According to the FTC, the ink hadn’t even dried on the agreement before Wallace and Rines were plotting a complex assault on MySpace. Wallace created more than 11,000 fraudulent profiles which he used to send large quantities of spam to legitimate users of the social networking site. He also set up pages that tricked users into revealing the log-in credentials for their accounts. Armed with this information, he used scripts that automatically accessed more than 300,000 accounts without permission so he could flood profile pages with at least 890,000 comments that linked to his websites. Wallace also took the liberty of bundling in code that prevented irate users from deleting the links.”

Nice, huh?

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POSTED IN: Online Money, Web News

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