Spamford Wallace charged for hacking 500,000 Facebookers

By Dan Goodin in Las Vegas • Get more from this author

Posted in Crime, 5th August 2011 00:32 GMT

One of the first figures to plaster the internet with millions of spam messages before being driven underground has been criminally charged for hacking some 500,000 Facebook accounts, stealing their personal information, and sending 27 million unwanted advertisements.

Sanford Wallace, now 43, first figured out a way to evade Facebook’s spam filters and then employed a script that automatically logged in to the accounts he had compromised and retrieve a list of all the users’ friends, according to an indictment filed Thursday in federal court in San Jose, California. He then allegedly posted junk messages on each of the friends’ Facebook wall.

When people clicked on a link in the message, they were directed to a website that phished their name, and account credentials, prosecutors said. He allegedly carried out the scheme in just five months, starting in November 2008.

“Wallace continued his spamming scheme by storing the information provided by Facebook users, such as email addresses and passwords,” the indictment stated. “Wallace then used the user’s email address and password to log into Facebook in order to continue to send spam messages.”

The indictment comes almost two years after Facebook was awarded $711m in damages from Wallace after suing him over the alleged scam. He faced a similar lawsuit from MySpace that in 2008 resulted in a $230m judgement. It’s doubtful the company has recovered a dime of either judgement.

Facebook can’t protect their users from spammers and ID thieves and Facebook wants to issue real IDs (drivers licences, etc) offline?  Great – just like the SSN’s, all over again.

via Spamford Wallace charged for hacking 500,000 Facebookers • The Register.