Sanford Wallace, a.k.a “Spamford Wallace”, has been busted again. This time to the record tune of $234 million (£120 million) for bombarding MySpace users with more than 735,000 messages, the Associated Press reports. The judgment is being called a landmark victory for anti-spam crusaders, and it breathes a little respectability into the much maligned piece of American anti-spam legislation, the Can Spam Act of 2003.

MySpace’s chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, told AP that Wallace and his business associate Walter Rines created scores of MySpace accounts and hijacked existing users’ accounts by stealing their passwords. Once inside, the duo, in some cases masquerading as trusted friends, messaged other users urging them to check out cool new videos or websites, some of which linked to pornographic sites.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Los Angeles ordered Wallace and Rines, who never attended the hearing, to pay $300 per message, the maximum penalty allowed under the Can Spam Act guidelines.

The punishment is not enough. It’s time to bring back the public stocks.