Who needs public funding when you have a horde of international spammers on the court stand? Once plagued by spam and phishing plots galore, MySpace has been taking a stand against the spammers as of late. You can add another victory to the list after MySpace won their most recent court battle against Media Breakaway CEO Scott “Spam-King” Richter for a reported $6 million deal.
This announcement comes only a month after MySpace received a $250 million settlement from spammers Stanford Wallace and Walter Rines. A judicial arbitrator decided Friday that Richter was to fork over $4.8 million in damages and a $1.2 million compensation for legal fees to MySpace. Richtor’s father, who stands as president of Media Breakaway, commented that the $6 million decision was only 95% of the fees in which MySpace originally requested.
When MySpace originally filed the claim back in January 2007, the social networking site requested $100 for every unlawful e-mail message sent, which would have resulted in an award in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The arbitration would eventually lead to denying MySpace the original hundreds of millions they requested.
MySpace accused Media Breakaway of violating the CAN SPAM Act among other legal security statutes which had pounced its members with unwanted spam from hijacked accounts in August 2006. Media Breakaway maintains that since they were told that there service was involved with suspicious MySpace activity that they have now taken a clean path.
While Scott Richer and Media Breakaway do not plan on appealing the arbitration’s decision the company denies responsibility for the “certain affiliates who violated Media Breakaway’s own affiliate terms and conditions.” Media Breakaway seems to believe that their company provided a legit service, but the motives of others led the service to be used for suspicious activity. Although, they do believe that blame was rightfully placed on them for the distribution of unsolicited e-mails to MySpace users.
The spam in question, which promoted a site called consumerpromotionscenter.com, duped MySpace users into thinking they had received a linked message from one of their friends. These hijacked accounts were then used to send mass messages to a user’s entire contact list.
This is not the first time that Scott Richter had been accused of illegal spam operations. RealBig.com, Richter’s previous company, was forced to declare bankruptcy after Microsoft filed a $50 million dollar lawsuit against them in 2005. The lawsuit was later settled in 2006 for a sum of $7 million.
While MySpace did not receive the sum of money they had originally requested, the repeated victories from the social networking giant continues to bring down spam monster companies from involving themselves within the community. But if history has taught us one thing about the Internet, it’s that spammers will always find a way to produce results. Whether it be through harmless, yet annoying PR messages or unlawful hijacking of private user information.
