Facebook, the popular social networking website, has won an $873 million (£573 million) payout from a Canadian spammer who flooded the platform with messages about drugs and sex.

Adam Guerbuez was accused of fooling members of the network into revealing their passwords to him in order to send out even more messages under his business name of Atlantis Blue Capital.

Senior counsel for Facebook Sam O'Rourke told the press that his company did not see the first-ever major spam case for the organisation as a one-off, adding that they were doing this in order to deter people from repeating the offence.

He continued: "We would like to have the message out there to spammers that we are not going to sit by and let them have that activity on our sites that is illegal and annoying to our users."

Facebook was founded in February 2004 and has over 120 million active users who have used the site within the last 30 days.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.