Spamming Facebook costs $873 Million.

But not only that, Informationweek reports that the spammers in question are also banned from facebook. Facebook Wins $873 Million Judgment Against Spammer

U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel handed down the award last week following four months of litigation. In addition to the monetary judgment, the ruling prohibits the defendants, Adam Guerbuez and his company, Atlantis Blue Capital, from accessing Facebook for any reason or assisting others in doing so.

AP reports that Adam Guerbuez of Montreal has been "difficult to find since Facebook sued him four months ago." I bet he has been.

Facebook isn't just breeding ground for spam, but also "Koobface" worm, all sorts of phishing tricks and more recently Facebook IM spam is gaining grounds. How easy is it to become a fake friend on facebook, and then spam you? Turns out it's silly easy: Computerworld has step-by-step instructions.

Step 1: Request to be "friends" with a dozen strangers on MySpace. Let's say half of them accept. Collect a list of all their friends.

Step 2: Go to Facebook and search for those six people. Let's say you find four of them also on Facebook. Request to be their friends on Facebook. All accept because you're already an established friend.

Step 3: Now compare the MySpace friends against the Facebook friends. Generate a list of people that are on MySpace but are not on Facebook. Grab the photos and profile data on those people from MySpace and use it to create false but convincing profiles on Facebook. Send "friend" requests to your victims on Facebook.

As a bonus, others who are friends of both your victims and your fake self will contact you to be friends and, of course, you'll accept. In fact, Facebook itself will suggest you as a friend to those people.

The irony here is the a lot of people use facebook instead of email, because email has been so polluted with spam that it's near useless these days. You can run, but you can't hide!

 

Previous article talking about Facebook on Adland:
People used in ads for Danish politicians on facebook without their permission, here we go again!
On Facebook, your face can be used in ads (without you knowing it) via SocialMedia
Facebook fertile grounds for adware and phishing scams
Facebook dials down the ad creepyness a tad after ruining more than Christmas

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