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Facebook awarded $873 million in spam case

By Jose Vilches, TechSpot.com
Published: November 24, 2008, 5:46 PM EST
Facebook has been awarded $873 million in damages against a Canadian man accused of sending spam messages to its members, marking the largest award 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 login information for Facebook users and then sending spam to those users' friends.

The amount awarded in this case tops the $234 million judgment won by MySpace in May to be paid by so-called Spam King Sanford Wallace, and the lesser $177,500 fine that two men were ordered to pay in October 2007 for their porn spam operation. Like previous cases, this is probably just a symbolic victory unlikely to yield Facebook much money, but hopefully it will represent a powerful deterrent to anyone seeking to abuse this and other sites for sending spam.

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User Comments (3)

Post a comment
old101
on November 24, 2008
7:43 PM
The judgments should have been "pay or jail time".

maniacgeorge
on November 25, 2008
7:09 AM
If they do get money from this deal will they just keep it? Its the users who have been affected-can't they hand out a few dollars to each of us to spend on facebook gifts...?

Please?

eafshar
on November 25, 2008
10:51 AM
why is facebook getting money for it? shouldn't it go to the people whose account got hacked?

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