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Facebook wins USD873m in spam case
A Canadian citizen has been ordered to pay Facebook USD873m in damages after spamming members of the social network.
A Californian judge says Adam Guerbuez and his company, Atlantis Blue Capital, must pay USD436.2m in statutory damages and another USD436.2m in aggravated statutory damages for sending 4m spam messages to Facebook users.
Facebook began legal proceedings in August, claiming Guerbuez had obtained the passwords of its members and was bombarding them with millions of "sleazy" emails about sexual products and drugs. He allegedly stole users' data with phishing messages, and then used botnets to spam their Facebook pages with messages that seemed to come from friends.
The network's head of security, Max Kelly, says that although he does not expect Guerbuez to honour the judgement, the case "represents a powerful deterrent to anyone and everyone who would seek to abuse Facebook and its users".
The case marks the largest award to date under the 2003 Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, which outlaws false or misleading information in the subject or header sections of marketing emails.
Although the law was designed for emails, a MySpace case earlier this year set the precedent for extending the law to social networks. In May, MySpace won USD234m from two of the internet's leading spammers, Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines.
In August, Facebook announced plans to step up its anti-spam filters. The firm said it would create tools that can delete spam messages from accounts and block URLs that direct people to spam websites.
"We will continue to invest in this area by improving our technical safeguards and devoting significant resources to finding, exposing and prosecuting the sources of spam attacks," says Kelly.
