Facebook has just struck a mighty blow against the spam industry by winning the judgment against the alleged Spam King of the Internet, Sanford Wallace. The U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California has ruled in agreement with Facebook's default judgment request that Wallace has willfully broken the Can-Spam Act and has victimized a multitude of people with his deceptive, fraudulent, and unsolicited promotional emails.

The presiding judge at the time, Judge Jeremy Fogel, has also found Wallace guilty of intentionally breaking a short-lived restraining order and submitted the issue to the U.S. Attorney's Office for trial of criminal contempt. Fogel further wrote in his judgment order that Wallace's blatant disregard for procedure as well as the rights of the Facebook company and its thousands of users whose accounts were victimized by his unlawful misconduct has influenced the verdict greatly.

Wallace had earned the dubious monikers of "Spam King" and "Spamford" for his role as leader of CyberPromotions, an infamous enterprise that's accountable for sending as many as thirty million spam emails daily during the last decade. Just recently, in May 2008, Wallace and another associate were required to pay two hundred thirty-four million dollars to MySpace in a trial that Wallace no-showed many times.

At this point, Wallace is permanently banned from accessing the Facebook website and prohibited from making a Facebook account, among many other court-ordered restraints. Moreover, even though Facebook's legal representatives didn't expect to get the vast majority of the seven-hundred-and-eleven-million-dollar award, Sam O'Rourke (the social networking corporation's lead counsel for intellectual property and litigation) hopes that the decision serves as an example to hundreds of spammers everywhere.

Facebook filed a suit against Sanford and two other spammers last February, with claims that the three used phishing methods and other illegal methods to treacherously gain unauthorized access to multiple Facebook accounts and use them to further spread the phishing spam throughout the international web community. The promising results of the lawsuit are considered by many observers to be an important victory in the seemingly never-ending fight against spam. It has set a precedent that would hopefully be emulated by other spam victims worldwide.