Facebook awarded $873 million in lawsuit against spammer

November 24, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

Spam marketing messages on Facebook have been getting worse over the last year as the site has grown — but maybe such spamming is about to stop. On Friday, the company won a court battle against spam perpetrator Adam Guerbuez and his front company, Atlantis Blue Capital: An $873 million award it will likely never be able to fully collect. You can download the ruling here (PDF).

Ads included objectionable (if not inaccurate) material for things like “legal marijuana” and male enhancement products. Samples below the article.

The civil action was filed under the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM), a 2004 law that, among other things, prohibits false or misleading marketing emails. Guerbuez’s messages were sent by fake or compromised Facebook accounts, using the site’s messaging system — such messages are being interpreted by courts as applicable to CAN-SPAM.

From Facebook:

Does Facebook expect to quickly collect $873 million and share the proceeds in some way with our users? Alas, no. It’s unlikely that Geurbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital 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.

Rival social network MySpace won a $230 million award against a notorious spammer named Sanford “Spamford” Wallace in March of this year.

Guerbuez is based in Montreal, Canada. Facebook has served him with the judgement and will be taking as much of his money as it can. It hopes this will have a deterrent effect on other individuals targeting its site. Given the difficulty of enforcing such laws around the world, its likely that spam will continue.

Guerbuez, in any case, is also banned from Facebook for life.

Sample spam messages below, with spam URLs removed.

Ringtones:

I finally found the best source out there for all the latest ringtines for my phone at http://www.spam THey dont sound bad like the ones from my actual phone company, these are 100 times better and they have thousands and thousands of ringers to choose from and when you use them the first time you get 20 free ringtones. Stop paying so much for your ringtones,don’t be a sucker, get them from my place, http://www.spam

Male Enhancement:

remember i told you about those pills that mike and his brother have been taking that made their pricks larger then life? well i finally got more info on whats been happening. mike have been taking the pills now for 6 months from http://www.spam and his brother about 3 months now. yesterday i found out that you know who has been taking them for the longest time now too, that blew me away. so the secret is out, these enlarge pills really work and more people then i realized are taking them daily. i am thinking of getting some for a certain someone today, they guarentee them 100 percent that they will work or every cent you paid back to you. http://www.spam

Marijuana:

hey, check this out! you know smoking bud? well there is this site http://www.spam that sells super potent legal bud, yes legal herbal bud for sale online, it doesn’t show up in drug tests or anything either, i started selling this stuff too and am making a killing, they ship it to you discreetly and it’s 100 percent money back guaranteed, this is the site http://www.spam it’s not illegal, but hurry up before they ban it in the states.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • jeff
    default judgments are "real" judgments. the court must provide an inquest to establish damages even if there is no opposition. if you are worried about damages, don't send out billions of pieces of spam, the way this guy did. my guess is that there was strict liability for something like a buck for each spam that contained some dishonest statement.
  • Look at section 41 of the complaint
    http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-c...

    Facebook themeselves don't seem to comply with what they were complaining about.

    CAN SPAM affects legitimate businesses, and not just "spammers" - in fact a huge proportion of "spam" is legally CAN SPAM compliant.

    The original filing had 5 complaints - the first one was in relation to CAN SPAM - whether CAN SPAM applies to messaging on social networks and messaging systems is a big deal, especially if the social networks provide no provision to comply.
    e.g. Try including a full mailing address in a tweet.. plus your message
  • AndyBeard, my understanding is that spam on social networks has been interpreted to fall under CAN SPAM -- first with the MySpace ruling and now with Facebook's.
  • Myspace was also a default judgement

    Here is another example, Disqus

    Disqus are a great service and when I get back to blogging again I need to do a writeup on all the progress they have made.

    However if this is a ruling that can affect case law in the future, then when you replied to my comment I received an email from a commercial blog, thus it might be interpretted as a commercial email.

    The is no physical mailing address in the email
    The preferences seem to be only global, so if I want to stop receiving email notifications from this post, or Venturebeat as a whole, I can't
    I have to log in to change my preferences

    Also of note for Facebook specifically, it might be might harder to defend against a class action based upon CAN SPAM the next time enough users get upset about zombie notifications.

    How about blogs on Blogger and their relatively new comment notifications - often hit with spam even from the few Google blogs that have open comments.

    This is why I would be horrified if this is looked on as a "real" citable judgement, as it opens up a can of worms.
  • I am not a lawyer, and US law is sometimes (at least for me) a confusing enigma, or at least the way it is portrayed.

    It is my understanding that this was a default judgement, which seems to be just a way for the courts to tie up assets, with the total set high enough to tie up everything possible.

    I would be horrified if this was a "real" judgement, as CAN-SPAM in relationship to social network communication is very much untested water.

    Just a few examples...

    1. Facebook just forced me to log into my account to change mail preferences
    2. What is the real material difference between phishing, and asking people for their Gmail password to scrape their contacts to send out viral invites?
    3. Emails from Facebook have no address details at all
    4. If Facebook claim that the defendants didn't provide a one click opt-out mechanism, yet they were using Facebook, then does that mean there is a prooblem with the Facebook interface? Is a wall post a "message" where every user has to have a chance to opt out from viewing wall posts of that user (the poster)?

    Extrapolate it out further, and how does this have an effect on blog comment spam that ends up in the email box of subscribers. Who is then liable?
  • HammerTyme
    LOL, thats purdy funny now aint it.

    http://www.privacy.es.tc
  • brian
    I have never heard anything as crazy as this...!

    can any one tell me how this actually works???
    http://www.livbit.com
  • Dan S.
    Is this spam in an article about spam? Hilarious...
  • hahahaha
  • It always bothered me that spammers always have such awful grammar. I'm not sure why, maybe its just a pet-peeve or something... It's just always bugged me. It honestly seems like every spam message has at least one instance of a comma not being followed by a space. ugh...
  • SoLinkable, I think I know why: Spammers have no incentive to provide quality content.

    If we make even a small typo, our readers will give us a hard time about it. Spammers, well, yeah....
  • DDayDawg
    The reason spammers can't spell well is that they aren't very bright. Smart people don't go into this line of work. It's the same reason criminals are usually complete idiots instead of the evil geniuses we see in movies.

    Another reason is that many of them are not from the US and English is not their first language. But I think the fact that they are idiots is the main reason. I am reading a book (Daemon) where nearly a thousand spammers all over the world were killed on the same day. It made me smile.
  • venturebeat
    hey, check this out! you know smoking bud? well there is this site http://venturebeat.com/ that sells super potent legal bud, yes legal herbal bud for sale online, it doesn’t show up in drug tests or anything either, i started selling this stuff too and am making a killing, they ship it to you discreetly and it’s 100 percent money back guaranteed, this is the site http://venturebeat.com/ it’s not illegal, but hurry up before they ban it in the states.
  • hahaha!
  • end of spam :)
  • Spam will always live :)
  • LOL, thats purdy funny now aint it...
  • Spam will always be a thing that can't be stopped, like how every majority has a minority that will try to rule against the rules. Criminals and spam goes hand and hand, and with search engine's algorithm and such that involves spamming to getting to the top results, it is no surprise that webmasters are willing to go so far into spamming.

    Albert
    http://www.mooladays.com
  • Man that is a lot of money
  • john_boesky
    end of spam? not likely. the spammers already know they are doing something criminal so how would a judgement scare them.

    http://www.johnboesky.com
  • That's pretty big for a spam case. Wow! That's pretty BIG!
  • FB could share money it will get from this lawsuit for read all the spam FB users got :)
  • edhardy622
    UGGs became ubiquitous among Southern California surfers and Southern California downhill skiers, and from there, Uggs, which name comes from the Australian
    http://www.uggboots365.co.uk
  • Wasn't the Myspace judgement overturned?
  • cfhfh

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