Reputed spam king Sanford Wallace has a deal with the Federal Trade Commission to stop slipping spyware into computers until a federal lawsuit against him is finished. The deal also involves Wallace and his SmartBot and Seismic Entertainment Productions sending online ads only to those visiting their Websites.
"The commission does believe this is great relief for consumers until the matter is ultimately resolved in the courts," said FTC attorney Laura Sullivan in a statement. "This provides wonderful protection for consumers in the interim."
Wallace – whose past as a spammer earned him such nicknames as Spam King and Spamford Wallace – insists that the government’s current hounding of him as a spyware purveyor is persecution based on his past as a spammer. As the former chief of Cyber Promotions, Wallace accounted for up to 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s.
"There have been several controversial stories covering spyware over the past year, and there are several companies that are actively engaged in the process," he told a newspaper in October, when a federal judge handed up a restraining order against him and his companies. "I think I was the easiest target to go after since I have such a controversial background on the Internet."
But the new deal pre-empted hearings originally set for this week connected to the October restraining order.
The FTC has accused Wallace and his two companies of using a number of techniques to lure surfers to Websites where spyware was slipped into their computers through Internet Explorer flaws. The spyware programs in question are thought to have changed surfers’ home pages, search engine preferences, and launched popup barrages, not to mention adding other tracking programs surfers weren’t aware they had in their computers.
The FTC also accuses Wallace of spamming SpyWiper solution tools to the spyware problem his companies’ programs caused in the first place.
