14 DAY TRIAL // MySpace has just shown that it really takes care of its registered users. Recently, they rooted out a spammer by suing him in court. The MySpace people filed a lawsuit against spammer Sanford Wallace that was using MySpace for his own financial purposes. What he did was send a lot of messages to MySpace users, trying to manipulate them into navigating to one of his sites. As I've read on c|net News, Wallace was doing business as FreeVegasClubs and RealVegasSins, both dot com registered websites, as well as Feeble Minded Production.
Now, what he did was huge - he had a scheme that enabled him to avoid the site's registration protocol. MySpace has a rule that you can only have one ID per e-mail address. But Wallace didn't even try to hack the website or anything like it. Nope, he just went and created over 11.000 unique e-mail addresses (using AOL services) and then created an account for almost each one of them. Since the numbers are huge, he did not do all by himself, he had a bot doing it instead.
After the accounts had been created, they started spamming other users. He also used phishing methods to get other MySpace users' IDs and passwords and then had their accounts spammed all day long as well. As seen on c|net, the culprit had posted 890.000 comments, sent nearly 400.000 messages and hacked 320.000 MySpace accounts. The numbers are huge and now this spammer has been taken down, fact which comes as a relief to MySpace which had stopped its users from being spammed like this.
Wallace has been forbidden by court decision to access or use the MySpace website to transmit ANY electronic messages. The court has also taken more decisions against the spammer, though c|net reports that MySpace did not obtain all the damages it wanted.