Facebook wins hypothetical $873 million from spammer
A Montreal resident has been fined $873 million by a San Jose court for sending spams through a popular social networking site. But Adam Guerbuez is probably going to feel more pain from the other element of his court punishment: a lifetime ban from Facebook.
The site claims Guerbuez sent more than 4 million messages, which appeared to come from other users on the site. That made the spam slightly more effective than most traditional e-mail spam as users may have believed the messages came from genuine friends.
Unfortunately for Guerbuez, that also made the messages illegal under the federal Can-Spam Act which doesn’t ban unsolicited messages outright, but does bar intentionally misleading e-mails sent in this way. Though the law is designed for e-mails, a case involving MySpace earlier this year established that it applies to social networking site messages as well.
The punishment appears to be based on a formula involving the volume of messages Guerbuez sent rather than any profits he may have made. The judgment shows the figure split evenly between statutory damages (for the spam itself) and aggravated statutory damages (which apply to specific techniques such as scanning sites to find e-mail addresses which users have posted, or randomly generating e-mail addresses in the hope of finding genuine accounts.)
Either way, Facebook is under no illusion that it can possibly collect the full amount, which appears to be the largest ever awarded in a Can-Spam case. The firm’s director of security posted on the company blog to say:
It’s unlikely that Geurbez and Atlantis Blue Capital [his business] could ever honor the judgment rendered against them (though we will certainly collect everything we can). But we are confident that this award represents a powerful deterrent to anyone and everyone who would seek to abuse Facebook and its users.
There’s some legal question about whether Facebook could actually force Guerbez to hand any money over: he’s a non-resident and doesn’t appear to have broken any Canadian laws. Still, he’s not taking any chances, having no-showed the court hearing and apparently disappeared without trace.
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