U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins has ruled Sanford Wallace, aka “Spamford”, and his offsider now owes MySpace 230 million bucks in damages.

It appears that Wallace and his trusty sidekick, Wallace Rines, created MySpace accounts and utilized phishing scams in order to gain access to other MySpace users accounts. From there, he began spamming under the assumed identities in order to sell ringtones or hawk money making schemes.

Big judgements and lawsuits aren’t anything new to Spamford - he headed a company called Cyber Promotions which reportedly cranked out 30 million emails a day back in the 1990’s and faced legal action from major ISP’s as a result. He was then involved in a spyware case that ended in a $4 million judgment against him in 2006. Even prior to the Internet, he was allegedly involved in fax spamming operations.

Far from flying under the radar, Spamford seemed to relish his notoriety - in this article he can be seen posing with cans of Spam (the real thing) and he even registered the name spamford.com.

I dug up this old interview with Spamford (1997) in his heyday where he states “any publicity is positive publicity”. I’ve seen so many people tripped up by believing that little pearl of unwisdom.

He also provides some very curious rationalizations for his activities and when asked whether he was worried that spam would be legislated against, he replied “Absolutely not”. He almost comes across as a legitimate businessman in the interview and certainly paints a positive picture of himself and his services to the Internet :).

Here you go Spamford - a bit more coverage for you in this post; and I see hundreds of other bloggers are doing the same.

I wonder if he still feels the same way about publicity as he did in 1997.