Facebook Awarded $711 Million in Damages in Spam Lawsuit

Facebook has won a second huge judgment in a spam-related case, being awarded $711 million in damages by a US court. The judgment is against self-described Spam King Sanford Wallace, a man who has seen his fair share of spam lawsuits and who already owes MySpace $234 million in a similar case. The man used a phishing scheme to get unauthorized access to Facebook users' accounts and then post false Wall messages.

“While we don't expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals. Most notably, the judge referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney's Office with a request that Wallace be prosecuted for criminal contempt, which means that in addition to the judgment, he now faces possible jail time. This is another important victory in our fight against spam. We will continue to pursue damages against other spammers,” Sam O'Rourke, Facebook's lead counsel for litigation and intellectual property, wrote on the Facebook blog.

Sandford Wallace is a notorious figure in the spam world, with a long record of spam-related offenses. In the nineties he led the CyberPromotion company, which, in its heyday, was pushing as much as 30 million spammy email messages every day. In the recent years though he moved to social networks, leading to him being ordered to pay MySpace $234 million.

Now he is being accused of taking over people's Facebook accounts and using them to push ads for various sites. Facebook sued him and two others back in February and the lawsuit ended with the record ruling. Surprisingly though, it isn't the highest sum ever awarded as Facebook won another case a year ago against Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital, in which it was awarded $873 million.

Facebook obviously doesn't expect to see much of the money as the man has failed to pay any of the money owed to MySpace and to several ISPs, which also won cases against him. Of course, he couldn't pay even if he wanted to as even spam isn't that profitable. If Facebook was to get the money though, it would be quite a nice way to make a living as the social network is expected to bring in just half a billion dollars in revenue this year.