California, November 25: Adam Guerbuez, a Canadian spammer and his company, Atlantis Blue Capital, have been found guilty in a spamming case filed by Facebook. As a result, Guerbuez has been imposed a fine of $870 million (£580million) in favor of Facebook (a social networking site) for damages suffered by it.

Guerbuez and his company were charged on the account of sending unwanted messages to the members of Facebook. The judgment against Guerbuez took place in San Jose, California.

As per the ruling, Guerbuez has to pay an amount of $436.2 million dollars in statutory damages and also an additional amount of $436.2 million dollars for violating the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act.

In a similar judgment that took place in May, the two accused (of sending illegal adverts for pornography and gambling websites to MySpace users) men were ordered to pay $234 million in damages to MySpace.

But $870 million is the largest amount of fine levied on anyone till date under the CAN-SPAM Act 2003. The act prohibits the sending of "false or misleading" information in the marketing emails’ header or subject sections.

In fact, Facebook had filed a complaint way back in August, against Guerbuez in which it claimed that Guerbuez somehow had come to know the passwords of Facebook users and consequently was bombarding innumerable unwanted messages related to sexual products and drugs to the users.

Max Kelly, the site's director of security, appreciated the kind of ruling the judge had passed and said it is the victory of the users. It is the first step towards triumph over spamming, spammers and “other online nuisances". He admitted that Facebook was trying hard to combat the constant efforts of spamming made by various spammers.

He further remarked through a blog post that this kind of ruling would certainly act as a deterrent and prevent more instances of spamming. "But we are confident that this award represents a powerful deterrent to anyone and everyone who would seek to abuse Facebook and its users," he wrote.

Taking a strict action to prevent such instances in future, the judge permanently barred Guerbuez and his company of sending any such messages to the Facebook users or communicating with them using the site.