The Federal Trade Commission's first major spyware lawsuit has ended with a more-than $4 million judgment against Sanford Wallace, a spam king turned "spyware master," writes CNET. A judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire ordered Wallace and his company, Smartbot.net, to turn over $4,089,500 in profits, the FTC said Thursday.

Wallace and the company were charged with deceptively installing spyware into PCs, changing their settings, bombarding them with pop-up ads and as a result causing PCs to slow down, crash and lose data. The FTC brought the case against Wallace in October 2004 - the first step in a new strategy to take on spyware.

The FTC has since taken legal action against six other alleged spyware purveyors. The agency on Thursday said it won a temporary injunction in a lawsuit against Odysseus Marketing and its head Walter Rines, and has reached a deal with OptinTrade and its principal, Jared Lansky, to surrender $227,000 in ill-gotten gains.