Former 'spam king' must pay MySpace $6 million

June 17, 2008 (IDG News Service) A Colorado man has been ordered to pay $6 million in damages and legal fees for spamming thousands of MySpace.com users.

Scott Richter of Westminster, Colo., 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, was 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% 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 Corp.

Scott Richter was removed from antispam 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."

 

And people wonder why I refuse to do blackhat/spam lol

 

Wow...
I wonder if he has that kind of money...
Nice post, thanks!

 

x1000000000000

 

In his comments he said he is happy to pay that fee. I am sure he made 10 times that amount, so it is just a cost of doing business to him.

 

Wow with this statement, the Richters sound like smart a**es here. Where's their publicist? They should have just stopped with "We respect the decision...blah blah blah" PERIOD.

 

What would be really smart of him now is stash the cash he made in a caymen or swiss account, then declare bankruptcy

 

yeh
i remember a forum called screennameforum which use to do alot of spamming and phishing
anyone remember a program called mychanger?? was awesome at the time

 

I wonder why the judge didn't order that the business be closed down as well?

 

nice story.

 

he own's CPA empire, I remember working for him once, never received my payment from cpa empire that is why I hate them.

 

Ok boys and girls, what did we learn? What can we take away from this? lol

 

In my opinion every spammer should receive this kind of penalty. No matter if he spammed just a few times or a million times like him. (100 million messages in one day???)

But still that's just insane

greetz,
jobic