As Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines did not attend the trial, this week the US District Court for the Central District of California awarded MySpace $234 million in damages. The defendants were found guilty of sending more than 700,000 spam messages to MySpace users. Among some other things, the spam contained ringtone adds and website links.

The judgement, the largest one in U.S. history so far, was made following the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, according to which per-message damages are limited to $100.

Winning the case takes care of only half of the situation; whether or not the two will be tracked down so that MySpace collects, remains to be seen.

Everything started back in March 2007, when MySpace pressed charges against Wallace; the complaint was then extended in September and Rines was included as well. In these 14 months of trial, Wallace showed up, accompanied by an attorney, only at the first hearings and then he simply stopped coming. Since then, nobody has been able to provide information with regard to his whereabouts.

However, the company is satisfied with the results of its action, as the judgement is expected to make future spammers think twice before trying to use MySpace for their illegal message sending, MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement.