Spam king Wallace turns himself in to FBI

Notorious spammer Sanford Wallace has voluntarily turned himself in to the FBI. Authorities were looking for him because he has been charged with a large-scale spam run via the social networking site Facebook.

Wallace was indicted in July along with two other spammers. He is suspected of three attacks on Facebook, in November 2008 and March 2009. In addition, he is alleged to have broken into half a million Facebook accounts to send 27 million spam messages via the social network.

Back in 2009, a US federal judge ordered Wallace to pay Facebook nearly $711 million for spamming and phishing. Wallace had massively sent messages to Facebook users with links to his phishing sites. These sites asked for Facebook login information and when people gave it, he used the accounts to send even more spam. According to Facebook, he also sent links to sites that paid him to generate traffic.

Wallace, who himself voluntarily reported to the FBI, is now charged with, among other things, intentionally causing damage to a computer system up to three times. If found guilty on all counts, the spammer could face up to 40 years in prison and a fine of more than $2 million.

In the 1990s, Wallace was involved in a company that would send 30 million spam messages a day. In 2006, Wallace was ordered to pay the FTC $4 million in damages, which would be the profit he made from putting spyware on millions of PCs. Just two years later, he was convicted of spam and phishing activity on MySpace, using the same tactics later used at Facebook.