From: ZDNet —

But nobody really expects him to pay up. In fact, the (former?) Montreal, Canada, resident has apparently gone in to hiding. And his spamming businesses is now out of business. Which, actually, was the point of the whole exercise.

As ZDnet’s Elinor Mills reports, “The default judgment was issued in federal court in San Jose, CA, on Friday [November 21, 2008] against Adam Guerbuez, of Montreal, and his company, Atlantis Blue Capital. The ruling also forbids Guerbuez from using Facebook or interacting with its members ever again. … Neither Guerbuez, who has made money selling videos showing people attacking the homeless in Montreal, nor Atlantis Blue Capital could be reached for comment.”

Facebook sued Guerbuez under the U.S. Can-Spam (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act, which prohibits ‘false and misleading’ marketing e-mails.

“Although the law was written for e-mail, a judgment in favor of MySpace in May set the precedent for extending the law to messages sent within social networks. In that case, MySpace was awarded US$234 million to be paid by so-called Spam King Sanford Wallace and another man,” Mills adds.

How do the courts come up with astronomical figures like (US)$873 million for fines in cases like this? It’s based on a relatively small set amount per offending message — multiplied by the number of spam messages known or estimated to have been sent. Web watchers note that spamming-for-dollars is a numbers game and a recent survey showed that only about one in 12.5 million spam e-mails evokes a response from recipients — so spammers have to pump out millions upon millions of spams to make any serious money.