MySpace Isn’t the Only One Suing Spammers

Posted by Nick O'Neill on August 25th, 2008 8:00 AM

Last week Law.com published an article highlighting a lawsuit filed by Facebook’s lawyers “against Adam Guerbuez, accusing the Canadian man of hijacking users’ accounts, impersonating them to send more than 4 million messages in March and April that market ‘offensive’ and ‘embarrassing’ products such as marijuana and penis enlargement pills.”

The Social Network Spam Problem

While there is no word on the amount Facebook is suing for, this is a continuing trend in the industry in which MySpace has been leading the charge against spammers. Users of social networks have not only been under attack by outside spammers though. Some social networks have even gone so far as to spam their own users. The most recent of the offenders is Reunion.com but many more have been offenders as well. The only difference is that the social networks have been able to avoid large settlements so far.

Spam is a critical issue on all social networks as it has been known to drive users away from the sites. The top social networks have increasingly dedicated more employees to fighting spam, some of which has actually compromised users’ privacy as I describe below.

Facebook’s Increasing Spam Challenge

The chief spammers that have been blasting out inappropriate content became more prevalent on Facebook in recent months. Facebook has been extremely aggressive in patrolling spammers though and this most recent lawsuit emphasizes how the company isn’t cutting any slack. Fighting spam is one of Facebook’s priorities and it isn’t surprising given the backlash that MySpace users had after receiving countless fake friend requests.

In the past few weeks spam has increased on Facebook and as Adam Rifkin wrote, even Matt Cohler had two spam posts on his wall. What is this new type of spam? Through effectively hijacking user accounts, spammers go and post wall posts that include a link which redirects users to insecure sites that request personal information.

I posted about this problem back in January but apparently the problem isn’t over. If you can’t shut the spammers down through technical methods, you might as well the sue them until they quit!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.