Montreal man banned from Facebook for spam

The social networking site has banned Guerbuez and taken its place in line with the Montreal man's other creditors, waiting to collect on a debt of CDN$1.1 billion. The 34-year-old owner of Atlantis Blue Capital declared bankruptcy in August.

In early October, the Quebec Superior Court announced that it had upheld a 2008 judgment by the U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., which ordered Guerbuez to pay Facebook damages for spamming its users with messages promoting erectile dysfunction cures and penis enlargement products. Facebook claimed that he had conned users into revealing their usernames and passwords, and then had posted wall messages that appeared to come from the users' friends. The court fined him $200 for each message sent.

Guerbuez did not contest the case in California, saying that he could not afford to mount a defence, but appealed the judgment in his home province, claiming that the fine was out of proportion with what a Canadian court might have awarded.

In the meantime, Guerbuez—who previously was in the news for his involvement in the white supremacist movement—has flaunted his free-spending lifestyle. In internet postings showing him in exotic locales, he has constantly referred to himself as “the 873 million dollar man,” a reference to the amount of the original judgment in U.S. currency.

Although he has repeatedly denied Facebook's allegations, Guerbuez says the publicity over the judgment is good for business. As he told the Montreal Gazette, “People know what I'm capable of doing: large-scale marketing.”