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Infamous “Spam King” Sanford Wallace is back in the news.  Popular social networking site Facebook, has filed a federal suit against him and two of his associates in San Jose District Court, alleging that the spammer and two associates were running an email harvesting operation aimed at their users.

It worked by sending them a message telling them their profile pic had been found on another website and provided a link.  When the user clicked it, they were taken to another site where a popup box asked for their name and email address, after which another popup asked them to choose a password.  If they do this they are sent on a wild goose chase of popups and fake error pages before finally being presented with the alleged pic of them, which naturally isn’t a pic of them at all but a picture of a monkey or a similar gag.  The site then reveals it’s all a fun prank and encourages the user to try it on all their friends.

The site’s true purpose is to harvest email addresses and passwords.  While the site provides a disclaimer advising the user NOT to use their Facebook password or any other password already in use on a different site or account, they know many users use the same password everywhere, in fact they are banking on it.  The phished addresses and passwords are then used to take over those accounts and send copious amounts of spam from them.

Neither Facebook or Wallace has commented on the suit, but this is nothing new for Wallace.  A little less than a year ago, MySpace won a lawsuit against him, and over the years he’s also been sued by CompuServe, AOL, and the FTC.

Read [Webpro News]