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Facebook “spam king” apprehended

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

August 8, 2011 | 2 min read

A US citizen responsible for spamming Facebook with over 27m junk mail messages has been arrested by FBI agents in California after turning himself in.

Sanford Wallace was wanted on allegations he had developed a program which allowed him to breach Facebook’s spam filters to solicit account details from unwitting users.

This the authorities believe saw messages posted on people’s walls, apparently by friends, urging users to visit a malicious website which captured their account details.

It is further alleged that this program was used to extract individual users own list of friends and so repeat the process.

Some 500,000 Facebook users are thought to have been affected by the campaign over a five month from November 2008 before Facebook pulled the plug on the illicit activity.

Wallace denies the charges and has been released on £61k bail.

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