Facebook Wins Monster Spam Suit
Facebook celebrated Friday as the company won over $800 million in a spam suit against Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital.
Late last week a federal Judge ordered $873 million to the social networking site. The company sued Guerbuez four months ago for sending trashy messages to users, many with sexually explicit content. While Facebook doesn’t expect to see all of the near one billion dollar the company said it will collect all it can, Guerbuez has reportedly been missing since Facebook sued him.
$873 million might seem like a huge amount to some folk, however Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled that in order for Guerbuez to send out the spam he did, he would have had to illegally access certain Facebook user data, violating the CAN-SPAM Act.
The case echoes a similar payout for MySpace a few months back. A federal judge awarded the News Corp owned site $230 million in a suit against Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines. Like with Guerbuez, neither Rines nor Wallace turned up to the hearing, and the whereabouts of the two at the time of ruling was sketchy.
Facebook’s Director of Security has said that while the company doesn’t expect to get every cent (or any cent), he hopes it sends a message to spammers that spam won’t be tolerated, echoing News Corp’s hopes that despite not being able to collect the money, it hopes it will send a message to other offenders.
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No one cares.
There is no `lesson' to be learned.
Only that you can sue for NOTHING these days, as we already knew.
All of this is b.s.. It's fake stuff. It's all imaginary and only exists as electrical 0's and 1's floating around. Yet it's treated as earnest as blood.
Shame on all of you techs who value your 0's and 1's more than reality.
Cheers,
I'm glad that the spammers lost their case but when them fleeing like that certainly with any profits they may have made through their illegal act catching them won't be easy.
Perhaps more laws should be passed and the next one to be caught will have criminal charges on them that places them in jail until the trial is over.
Good, spammers are a blight on the internet. More then 95% of all emails are spam.
err, so they get away scot free with their money, and that sends a good message how?
I hope Facebook spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for legal representation and receive nothing from the case. In my opinion, from what they have done to me, they deserve it.