WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sanford Wallace, known as the "Spam King," has turned himself in to U.S. authorities after he was indicted for masterminding a scheme that sent more than 27 million unsolicited junk messages through Facebook's servers.
The Las Vegas man surrendered to FBI agents to face 11 counts of fraud, intentional damage to a protected computer and criminal contempt for ********* previous orders to stay off the social networking sites Facebook and MySpace, prosecutors in San Jose, California said late on Thursday.
Wallace, 43, developed a program that evaded Facebook's spam filters and posted messages encouraging account holders to visit a website, purportedly from a friend, according to the indictment unsealed on Thursday.
Instead, unsuspecting users were prompted to enter their email addresses and passwords and then were redirected to an affiliate website that earned Wallace "substantial revenue" for directing the traffic, the indictment said.
