Adam Guerbuez: Spamming Douchebag

Posted by: Tristan

Facebook won $873 million in damages from spammer Adam Guerbuez on Friday, in the largest award under the 2003 Can-Spam Act.

The award was handed down after four months of litigation.  The judgement also bans Guerbuez and his company, Atlantis Blue Capital, from accessing Facebook.

“We’ve all experienced spam — those unwanted and, sometimes, inappropriate marketing messages,” said Facebook director of security Max Kelly and deputy general counsel Mark Howitson in an e-mailed statement. “The bad guys behind those messages are always looking to find new ways to annoy people and Facebook’s users have been among those targeted. We don’t take this affront to our users lying down.”

Guerbuez didn’t show up to court, but Sam O’Rourke, senior corporate counsel for Facebook said, “We are going to go after him. We know where he is and we’re in the process of executing the judgment.”

Between March and April, Guerbuez sent more than 4 million spam messages to Facebook users, the complaint states. He allegedly did so by stealing Facebook users’ logon details using phishing messages and through data obtained from third parties. He then allegedly used botnets to spam Facebook users’ message posting pages, or Walls, with messages from the hijacked accounts of spam recipients’ Facebook friends.

Unlike e-mail spam, which is generally viewed and/or deleted in private, social networking spam may have social repercussions. The Wall-post spam was visible to anyone viewing an affected Facebook profile, and appeared to be endorsed by the account owner and the friend who posted it.

What was Guerbuez spamming for?

“The products marketed by these spam messages included marijuana, male enhancement pills, and sexually oriented material.”

Spamming for male enhancement pills?  That’s a switch.