Justice was served in an exemplary manner in the case of Facebook vs. Canadian spammer Adam Guerbuez, as US District Judge Jeremy Fogel ordered the man to pay a huge $873 million. He is also forbidden to ever access again the popular social networking Web site.

Guerbuez, who runs Atlantis Blue Capital and Ballervision.com, was found guilty of illegally accessing the profile data of Facebook’s users in order to send his spam messages, thus violating the US federal CAN-SPAM Act. He tricked users into giving him their login details and from their accounts managed to send out more than 4 million messages promoting male enhancement pills and many other products.

"It's unlikely that Geurbez 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," said Max Kelly, Facebook's director of security, in a recent blog posting.

Sam O'Rourke, Facebook's senior corporate counsel, also commented on the decision, saying that everyone inside the company knows that there is no way of collecting the awarded amount. Still, he strongly believes that the court’s decision will make spammers think twice before messing around on Facebook, or any similar Web site.

Facebook filed the law suit against Blue Atlantic and Guerbuez on August 14, after deciding to look into an unusually high amount of spam recorded in March and April.