In a major deterrent to wannabe spammers, a US federal judge has awarded News Corp-owned social networking Web site MySpace a landmark judgement wherein one Sanford Wallace alias 'Spam King' and his partner Walter Rines have been ordered to cough up a whopping $230 million in damages for mass spamming of MySpace member accounts.

In a landmark ruling, US District Judge Audrey B Collins (Los Angeles) ruled in favor of MySpace after Wallace and his partner-in-crime failed to show up for a court hearing on Monday this week. Not only is the ruling a win-win for MySpace but also qualifies as the largest anti-spam judgement ever. Whether MySpace chooses to collect the $230 million or not, the site hopes this will be a huge ward-off for others who might be tempted to follow a similar path.

Sanford Wallace began spamming quite early in life when as head of 'Cyber Promotions' he earned notoriety as 'Spam King' for sending as many as 30-million junk emails in a day. As regards MySpace, Wallace and Rines had a neat operation going wherein they either created their own accounts or took over existing ones by stealing passwords, only to then email other MySpace members asking them to check out a cool video/Web site that turned out to be no prizes for guessing, a money laundering scheme. In this manner, the duo succeeded in sending over 730,000 junk messages to MySpace members, most of them made to look very genuine and authentic. For each such violation, MySpace is entitled to $100 in damages, the amount tripled when conducted 'willfully and knowingly' -- as per the 2003 federal anti-spam law known as CAN-SPAM.

Judge Collins in his ruling awarded the amounts sought by MySpace as: $157.4 million jointly against Rines and Wallace; an additional $63.4 million against Rines under CAN-SPAM; more $1.5 million against the pair under California anti-phishing law; plus $4.7 million in attorneys fees. He also issued injunctions barring similar activities in future.

A jubilant Nigam said in a statement that MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on their site. That they remain committed to punishing those who violate the law and try to harm their members. Significantly, he added that anybody who's been thinking about engaging in spam is now going to say, "Wow, I'd better not go there".