Sanford Wallace can make a reasonable bid to be the most hated man on the internet. If you’ve ever gotten a spam message slapped up on your Facebook wall, ever had an email try to download something without your consent, or gotten an ad for an “enlargement” pill in your inbox, Wallace was the man who pioneered all those obnoxious tactics. But now, after being irritating online since there was an internet to be irritating on, Wallace is finally getting his comeuppance in the form of jail time.
Wallace has spent most of the last decade in and out of court. In 2007, Myspace sued him and won a $230 million judgement against him. In 2009, after Wallace had filed for bankruptcy, Facebook won a symbolic victory by getting a $711 million judgement against him for Facebook spam. But nearly a billion dollars in fines wasn’t enough, so the FBI investigated him and he was charged in 2011.
It took five years to convict him, but convict him they did. Wallace has two and a half years of jail time ahead of him, and not only that, he’s got five years of probation and mental-health treatment to complete, and he won’t be allowed to touch a computer while on probation. Yes, that’s more or less what Jonny Lee Miller’s character got in Hackers.
That said, the techniques Wallace invented are still used today to annoy us, so even though he himself can’t bury us in dodgy pill ads and Nigerian prince scams, they will likely follow us until the end of time. At least everyone can take solace in the fact that even though this guy has been annoying people since the days of fax machine, karma finally caught up.
(Via Boing Boing)