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Canadian Spammer asked to Pay Facebook $1 billion

A Montreal (Canada) man, namely, Adam Guerbuez has been asked to pay Facebook $1 billion after reportedly spamming its members with some spam messages.

In the last week of September 2010, Quebec Superior Court (based in Canada) upheld this November 2008 court ruling against Guerbuez after he was caught of sending almost 4 million penis-enlargement, marijuana and pornographic spam messages through Facebook.

The social networking site which calls the self-styled Internet marketer, Guerbuez, a spammer accuses him for creating fake phishing web pages to cheat victims into revealing their usernames and passwords and then using a botnet of hacked systems to send out several spam messages. If the charges are found true, that could result to criminal charges along with the civil judgment against him.

But, the experts opine, that it is doubtful that the social networking site will get any money from the hacker.

Graham Cluley, Senior Technology Consultant at security firm Sophos stated that Guerbuez will escape from paying any fines as he has been declared bankruptcy. It might be some optimistic official of Facebook who thinks that the money will come back to them, as per the news by Sophos.com on October 6, 2010.

Also, Secretary General of the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) commented that law enforcement will levy criminal charges on Guerbuez, as per the reports by computerworld.com on October 6, 2010.

While Cluley and Cassidy commented about Guerbuez, Max Kelly, Facebook's Director of Security hopes that the ruling will help Facebook. He said that this punishment serve as a strong symbol to anyone who tries to abuse Facebook and its users, as per the news by Softpedia.com on October 6, 2010.

Moreover, this is not the only big judgment against a Facebook spammer. In 2009, the company got a similar US$711 million judgment against notorious spammer Sanford Wallace.

Related article: Canadian Retailer Faces Security Breach of Customer Credit Numbers

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