Facebook Wins $711 Million In Lawsuit Against Sanford Wallace
Amit Chowdhry | October 30, 2009 | 353 views | CommentsCategorized under Facebook, Judge Jeremy Fogel, Sanford Wallace
Back in March Facebook filed a lawsuit against Sanford “Spamford” Wallace, Adam Arzoomanian and Scott Shaw over spam messages being sent on their social network. The claim was made under the CAN-SPAM Act which bans false and misleading marketing e-mails. The U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California ruled in favor of Facebook.
Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled that Wallace “willfully violated” a restraining order and a preliminary injunction that was issued in the case. “The record demonstrates that Wallace willfully violated the statutes in question with blatant disregard for the rights of Facebook and the thousands of Facebook users whose accounts were compromised by his conduct,” stated Fogel. The statement also ruled that Wallace no longer has the right to create a Facebook account.
Facebook’s lead counsel said that the social network does not expect to receive a majority of the reward, but the verdict of the case may serve as a deterrent for others who plan to spam the social network.
Back in May Wallace had to pay $234 million in a trial against MySpace. Wallace failed to turn over documents or show up in court on several counts when that case was taking place. Two years before that, Wallace had to pay $4 million as part of a lawsuit by the FTC and several other companies such as AOL. Last year Facebook was awarded $873 million from a Canadian man that was spamming the social network too.
