A King Without His Treasure
Just a quick follow-up to a post I wrote a few weeks ago about “Spam King” Sanford Wallace. Wallace had been defaulted by a federal district court in California in a suit brought by MySpace for running a spamming and phishing scam on the site.
The court recently awarded MySpace $230 million against Wallace in what is apparently the largest spam award yet. Of course, chances are that MySpace will never see a penny of that money—or if they do, it will be a miniscule fraction of the award. Of course, no one will shed a tear if MySpace drives Wallace into bankruptcy. It won’t stop him anyway.
And MySpace doesn’t need the money. But it’s a symbolic victory and a great public relations plug for the company. It gives MySpace bragging rights to its users, attorneys general of all 50 states, and the federal government that it takes these issues seriously and doesn’t waver—even though getting a default judgment is not all that difficult to do. Hopefully, MySpace will pursue it further and try to actually collect on the award.

