NEW YORK — The popular online hangout MySpace has won a $234 million judgment over junk messages sent to its members in what is believed to be the largest anti-spam award ever.

A federal judge in Los Angeles ruled against notorious "Spam King" Sanford Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, after the two failed to show up at a court hearing, MySpace told The Associated Press yesterday.

Wallace earned the monikers "Spam King" and "Spamford" as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s. He left that company, Cyber Promotions, following lawsuits from leading Internet service providers such as Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, only to re-emerge in a spyware case that led to a $4 million federal judgment against him in 2006.

"MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site," said MySpace's chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam. "We remain committed to punishing those who ... try to harm our members."

Rines and Wallace created their own MySpace accounts or took over existing ones by stealing passwords through "phishing" scams, Nigam said.

They then e-mailed other MySpace members, he said, "asking them to check out a cool video or another cool site. 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."

MySpace said the pair sent more than 730,000 messages to MySpace members, many made to look like they were coming from trusted friends, giving them an air of legitimacy. Under the 2003 federal anti-spam law known as CAN-SPAM, each violation entitles MySpace to $100 in damages, tripled when conducted "willfully and knowingly."

In court papers, MySpace said the activities resulted in bandwidth and delivery-related costs, along with complaints from hundreds of users.