Facebook wins $873M judgment in spam suit

IDG News Service - Social networking company Facebook won an $873 million judgment in a case against a spammer in one of the largest awards yet for a suit filed under the CAN-SPAM Act.

The suit charged Adam Guerbuez, Atlantis Blue Capital and 25 other unnamed people for falsely obtaining log-in information for Facebook users and then sending spam to those users' friends.

Guerbuez and the others set up fake Facebook pages where users would enter their log-in details, which the spammers could then steal, Facebook charged in the suit. During the months of March and April this year, the spammers used the stolen log-in names to send more than 4 million spam messages over Facebook's network, the social networking site alleged.

The spam messages would show up on Facebook users' profile pages and appeared to indicate that the users endorsed products such as marijuana, male enhancement pills and other materials, according to the suit.

Guerbuez is a Canadian citizen, and Atlantis Blue Capital is a company name he uses to register domain names, Facebook said.

The activities violated CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) and other computer fraud and privacy laws, Facebook said.

On Friday, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose ruled that the defendants violated the CAN-SPAM Act. They were ordered to pay Facebook $873 million in damages. The judgment also included injunctions preventing Guerbuez and his colleagues from accessing any Facebook data in the future.

Earlier this year, a MySpace spammer was ordered to pay more than $230 million for violating CAN-SPAM. At the time, that was believed to be the largest award yet under the act.