A 47-year-old man in Nevada, US, has pleaded guilty for sending over 27 million spam messages to Facebook users in a span of three months.
US Attorney Melinda Haag said Sanford Wallace of Las Vegas admitted to having accessed around 500,000 Facebook accounts between November 2008 and February 2009. He has also accepted that he violated a court order not to access the computer network of the social networking site.
Wallace, also known as the Spam King, sent spam messages to the leaked account holders.
The Spam King has been freed on bond and is due to be sentenced in December with a $250,000 fine and about three years in prison.
Earlier this month, it was reported that hackers are evading spam filters on Facebook’s popular comment plugin to undertake a technical support scam for several operating systems, including Windows and Mac.
The attackers are posting messages and inserting links into them five or ten minutes later in order to avoid spam filters.
Phoney Facebook pages are being used to disguise the hackers activity. They are also targeting Mac OS X machines and iPhones.
Facebook is working on a new security tool to help its users in identifying and removing malicious software from their computers.
