Facebook, looking to dismiss a claim by a Western New York man to half of the $100 billion social networking giant, told a judge he was a liar and a fraud.
And then Facebook’s lawyers got mad.
They claim the man, Paul Ceglia, forged the 2003 contract he is basing his entire federal court case on, made up e-mails to bolster his case and destroyed evidence of his massive fraud.
Ceglia hopes to increase his chances of squeezing some cash out of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg by upending the company’s expected initial public offering, the lawyers said in court papers.
They asked a judge to toss Ceglia’s suit.
Ceglia claims to have e-mails showing he hired Zuckerberg in 2003 for a variety of Web projects, one of which turned into $100 billion Facebook.
Facebook claims Ceglia hired Zuckerberg in 2003, the year before Zuckerberg helped found Facebook, to work on StreetFax, a tech startup that aimed to sell photos of street intersections to insurance companies.
Needless to say, Streetfax did not become the prize Facebook became.
Ceglia is just the latest nobody to grab for Facebook’s fortune, claiming the social network was their baby. First their was the Winklevoss twins, who did get tens of millions because they tapped Zuckerberg for their social Web idea before he founded Facebook.
Real founder Eduardo Saverin won a big settlement in his lawsuit against Zuckerberg after he was squeezed out of the company early on.
Facebook paints Ceglia as a total fraud who might as well have a napkin with Zuckerberg’s signature on it that says, “I owe you half of Facebook.”
Facebook is seeing trolls everywhere these days.
Facebook has been in legal battles left and right since filing to become a public company. Even Yahoo! claims it owns patents behind important parts of the social network’s underlying technology.