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Record compensation ordered from phishing spammers

Two men have been ordered to pay $230 million (£118 million) to MySpace in damages after using phishing websites to steal passwords.

Sanford Wallace - known as the "Spam King" - and Walter Rines failed to attend the court hearing where a judge awarded the social networking website the highest award since the creation of the CAN-SPAM Act in 2003.

The Associated Press explains that under this act, each violation of the law entitled MySpace to $100.

It chose to sue after it discovered that the pair had used phishing emails to capture users' login details in order to spam their list of friends.

The website's chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam told the news agency the pair would send emails encouraging the recipient to visit a "cool video" or website.

"When you [got] there, they were making money trying to sell you something or making money based on hits or trying to sell ring tones," he added.

On its website, MySpace lists safety tips for users and urges them to remember that users they interact with are not necessarily who they claim to be.

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