The popular online hangout MySpace has won a $230 million judgment over junk messages sent to its members in what is believed to be the largest anti-spam award ever.
A federal judge in Los Angeles issued the award when Sanford Wallace and associate Walter Rines failed to show up for a court hearing.
Wallace earned the monikers "Spam King" and "Spamford" as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s. He left that company, Cyber Promotions, following lawsuits from leading Internet service providers such as Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, only to re-emerge in a spyware case that led to a $4 million federal judgment against him in 2006.
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MySpace sued under the federal anti-spam law that provides $100 in damages for each violation and triples that if the violation is on purpose.
Wallace and Rines were accused of sending more than 730,000 messages to MySpace members as fake friends, recommending "cool" sites that turned out to be money-making schemes selling things like ring tones.
MySpace said the spamming ate up valuable space and angered members.
