'Spam King' arrested for hacking 500,000 Facebook accounts

A notorious spammer known as the “Spam King” has surrendered to the FBI on charges of bombarding Facebook users with unwanted messages after breaching the security 500,000 accounts.

Sanford Wallace, 43, also known as "Spamford Wallace" and "David Frederix", was arrested in Las Vegas on Thursday.

Wallace is accused of hacking into 500,000 accounts to harvest friend lists between November 2008 and March 2009. He allegedly used the compromised lists to make more than 27 million unsolicited postings on Facebook walls that appeared to come from friends.

If targets clicked on links within the messages, they were presented with a website designed to fool them into handing over their full name, email address and password, prosecutors said. Finally they would be redirected to affiliate websites that would allegedly pay Wallace “substantial revenue” for traffic.

The scheme relied on vulnerabilities that Wallace discovered in Facebook’s spam filters, according to the indictment.

“To accomplish his scheme, Wallace first tested his spamming capabilities between two Facebook accounts,” it said.

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