Former 'spam King' Must Pay Myspace $6 Million

<div align="center">A Colorado man has been ordered to pay US$6 million in damages and legal fees for spamming thousands of MySpace.com users.


Scott Richter of Westminster, Colorado, must pay MySpace $4.8 million in damages and $1.2 million in legal fees, a court-appointed arbitrator ruled on Thursday.

Richter, who was once accused of pumping out more than 100 million spam messages per day, had been sued by MySpace in January 2007 in connection with an August 2006 campaign in which MySpace members were hit with unsolicited messages promoting a Web site called Consumerpromotionscenter.com. The messages were sent from phished MySpace accounts, according to the findings of Philip Boesch, the court-appointed arbitrator in the case.

The messages were sent to a MySpace community that was ill-equipped to deal with any security problems. At the time, "MySpace only employed two relatively junior staff employees to deal with these issues," Boesch wrote. The company's security staff has now grown to about 40, he added.

MySpace had been seeking a court ruling in the case, but in August 2007, U.S. District Judge George King of the Central District of California granted Richter's request to assign the matter to arbitration. Terms of the award were made public on Monday.

In a statement, Richter said that he and his company, Media Breakaway, were happy to have this matter behind them, noting that the arbitrator's award was 95 percent less than the amount sought by MySpace.

"We respect the decision of the arbitrator and we're not going to appeal it," said Steven Richter, the president and general counsel of Media Breakaway and father of Scott Richter. "We're going to pay the money he awarded."

This is not the first time a Scott Richter company has had to cough up millions of dollars to fight spam charges. In 2005, his previous company, Optinrealbig.com, paid $7 million to settle similar charges brought by Microsoft.

Scott Richter was removed from anti-spam organization Spamhaus' list of known spammers that same year.

Media Breakaway, which has no other spam cases pending, is doing everything it can to build a compliance team and make sure it is acting within the law, Steven Richter said.

MySpace said the Richter award was the latest in a series of steps it has taken to combat abuse on its Web site. In May, the company was awarded a $230 million antispam judgment against Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines.

"This award reflects MySpace's continued momentum and holistic approach to ridding the site of spammers and phishers," MySpace said in a statement. "We will continue to do our part in cleansing the Internet of this invasive onslaught of spam."

Source:

Code:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080617/tc_pcworld/147159

</div>

 

owned

 

Wow, I mean why the F do people have to spam others just to get their feelings out... :blink:

The dude is just stupid

In other words, OWNED BY GOVERNMENT X_X

Vanquish

 

He really got owned. Well it's his fault for spamming. Should've probably made a blog just to spam. Would be better & safer like that.

 

That is what people do when they do not have a life or a wife for that matter of fact

They just sit home, become computer G33ks and then spam others like hell.

Van

 

He got owned and that still hurts.

That's $ 6,000,000 , plus tax? lol

I wanted to seriously PM you over 10x , just to see your face mad.

 

crazy 100 million msg's a day, How many is that per hour? DANG! to much time on hands

 

Sounds like the guy has a lot of money anyways. It also sounds like he's just going to keep doing.

 

dang, you had to see this coming though at some point, i mean with all the friggin spam thats out there on almost any site

and i like a lot of people had a myspace, but left and went over to facebook for the mere fact that there was no constant spam. i mean myspace got to the point where you could get 1-5 messages and friend requests each day that were completely spam.

so as much as $6 million i think is a little over drastic in this case, at least the friggin spam will at least calm down a little at myspace and hopefully now elsewhere

 

uber pwnt tbh.

 

Dude doesn't seem to care, I don't blame him. Microsoft themselves sued him and he had no issues paying their multi-million dollar lawsuit, and that was years ago, inflation alone would put it up to where it is now with his current case, and without a doubt hes making more money now than he was then.

Hes going to keep doing it till they give him a consequence larger than what he can handle.

 

he should have just bought myspace

 

You realize how much MySpace last sold for, right?

(for those of you who don't know, it was $580 million)

 

I read about this. I think it's just hilarious.

 

Myspace has grown crazly unexpected by the starter himself. Like dem said he's just gonna keep doing it until he gets a punishment that he cant handle. Hard to believe that he survived Microsoft lol. If i had to pay 1million plus I would be broke.