“Spam King” Hit With Yet Another Lawsuit

Infamous “Spam King” Sanford Wallace is being sued once again. This time it’s by Facebook, who filed a federal suit against him and two of his associates last week in San Jose District Court. The suit alleges that Wallace and his associates ran an email harvesting operation on the popular social networking site. It worked by sending Facebook users a message telling them their profile pic had been found on another website and provided a link. When the user clicked it, they were taken to another site where a popup box asked for their name and email address, after which another popup asked them to choose a password. If they do this they are sent on a wild goose chase of popups and fake error pages before finally being presented with the alleged pic of them, which naturally isn’t a pic of them at all but a picture of a monkey or a similar gag. The site then reveals it’s all a fun prank and encourages the user to try it on all their friends.

The site’s true intent is to harvest email addresses and passwords. While the site provides a disclaimer advising the user NOT to use their Facebook password or any other password already in use on a different site or account, they know many users use the same password everywhere, in fact they are banking on it.

Neither Facebook or Wallace has commented on the suit, but this is nothing new for Wallace. A little less than a year ago, MySpace won a lawsuit against him, and over the years he’s also been sued by CompuServe, AOL, and the FTC.