Facebook awarded $873 million in spam case

Facebook has been awarded $873 million in damages against a Canadian man accused of sending spam messages to its members.

The default judgment was issued in federal court in San Jose, Calif., on Friday against Adam Guerbuez, of Montreal, and his company, Atlantis Blue Capital. The ruling also forbids Guerbuez from using Facebook or interacting with its members ever again.

Facebook doesn't expect to necessarily collect the money because "it's unlikely that Geurbez and Atlantis Blue Capital could ever honor the judgment rendered against them," Max Kelly, Facebook's director of security, wrote in a blog posting on Monday. "We are confident that this award represents a powerful deterrent to anyone and everyone who would seek to abuse Facebook and its users."

Neither Guerbuez, who has made money selling videos showing people attacking the homeless in Montreal, nor Atlantis Blue Capital could be reached for comment.

Facebook noticed an uptick in spam beginning in the spring, with Facebook members receiving messages from friends and other members offering things like herbal marijuana and male enhancement pills for sale, a spokesman said. The messages were coming from Facebook accounts that had been compromised.

Facebook sued under the Can-Spam (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act, which bans "false and misleading" marketing e-mails. Although the law was written for e-mails, a judgment in favor of MySpace in May set the precedent for extending the law to messages sent within social networks. In that case, MySpace was awarded $234 million to be paid by so-called Spam King Sanford Wallace and another man.

The Facebook award is the largest judgment in history for a case brought under the Can-Spam Act, according to Kelly.

Facebook has beefed up its antispam technology since the spring, creating tools that can delete spam messages from accounts and block URLs that direct people to spam Web sites.

[gsmiller88]

And Facebook will get to keep every dime of that while their apps continue filling users inboxes with garbage.

[Mr. Dee]

I think I should get some of this cash. My Hotmail inbox is littered with Facebook spam from people I don't know. The way I discovered I was getting spammed was by the email address. Friend invitations are sent to my Yahoo! account, not Hotmail.

[inverse137]

Disregarding my personal feelings of vigilantism and what I would like to do with a spammer's scrotum, a hammer and some rusty nails and looking at this just from a "legal" standpoint: are you phreaking kidding me? nearly $1 BILLION dollars in punitive damages?

Un-f'ing-believable...

While I would like nothing better than the next reality TV show to be nothing more than a spammer chained to a wall naked with 5 pissed off IT managers in the room with him, I find it incomprehensible as to how you can have a $1 Billion judgement against this idiot.

[bambooish]

Spams appears when a user put his email address at some website just because they want to win cash/car/vacation. Did anyone ever read their privacy policy providing that they had one. Those are the fine prints we ignore as we happily press the "Submit" button. Some of those policy statements will say nasty things that they can do with your email address, like selling it to a third party company that distribute spams. Of course, they will word it so that you can't tell what in the world they are talking about. People have no sense of security while surfing on internet. Randomly giving out email address is like saying "Here you go, this is where I lived" and typing in your password on a website is like giving it the key to your house.

From what I know, the password hijacking was in the form of links send through messengers and when a person clicks on the link, it takes them to a website which appeared like facebook friend's picture album and asks for password for entry. Upon entry, there was nothing. My friend was smart enough to notice it was a password collecting website and had to change all his password to everything he remembers.

[tacit]

Spam also appears when spammers launch "dictionary attacks" (sending spam to random but common words at email addresses or on social networking sites, or sending spam to accounts named "aaa", "aab", "aac", and so on), or when spammers scrape email addresses or social networking login names from Web sites, friendlists, and other sources. It is not necessary for you to voluntarily give out your name or your social networking alias in order to get spam.

[Cnet_viewer]

Only in America will a company expect U.S. law to apply and be enforceable outside the U.S. The Can-Spam law does not apply to people living in Canada, unless the U.S. has annexed Canada without anyone knowing about it. Of course Facebook will never see a dime of this judgment nor will Adam Guerbuez have to abide by the injunction. If Facebook wants to go after this guy they will have to go through a Canadian court.

[ittesi259]

If his business comducts ANY transaction on American soil his company is bound to it, and so is he as the owner.

[ittesi259]

If his business comducts ANY transaction on American soil his company is bound to it, and so is he as the owner. This surely must be the case or the defendants would have just filed a motion stating the court had no jurisdiction.