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March 28th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Facebook is hoping to stamp out what it considers an “opportunistic and fraudulent” lawsuit filed by Paul Ceglia, who claims that he owns half of the social media behemoth.
Ceglia filed the suit in 2010, which alleges that he gave Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg $1,000 in start-up capital for Facebook in exchange for 50% of the company if it took off.
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To back up his claims, Ceglia produced a contract which he argued showed that he had hired Zuckerberg to do some “limited website development work” for StreetFax, an out-of-business company which Ceglia once ran. As part of Zuckerberg’s payment, Ceglia claims he and Zuckerberg struck the $1,000-for-50% Facebook deal.
Ceglia claimed he forgot about the contract until looking through his records after being charged for sales fraud.
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Facebook submitted what it called a “treasure trove of evidence” that Ceglia’s claims are false and represent a “fraudulent shakedown.” According to Facebook, Ceglia’s version of the contract and emails between himself and Zuckerberg were both faked.
The company’s dismissal is based on a great deal of data retrieved from Ceglia’s hard drive, which had been submitted as evidence and analyzed by the computer forensics team Stroz Friedberg.
On that drive, the forensics team found the original contract between Ceglia and Zuckerberg, which the company says Ceglia used as a basis for his forgery. Multiple “test forgeries” were found, which Facebook claims were copies made by Ceglia as he attempted to perfect his technique.
Facebook’s forensics team found evidence of forgery on the physical copy of the contract submitted by Ceglia as well.
Ceglia tried to “bake” the physical copy of the contract — he hung it by clips and exposed it to light in an effort to give the forged document and the ink an “aged” look. But eagle-eyed analysts are trained to look for those tell-tale signs of forgery: they decided the ink on Ceglia’s document was “fresh,” and “fewer than two years old,” meaning it couldn’t have been signed in 2003-2004.
The alleged emails between Zuckerberg and Ceglia, according to Facebook, were also “bogus.” They say Ceglia created the emails on a computer which had its internal clock reset to 2003 and 2004. However, he made a series of “amateurish mistakes:”
1. Ceglia reset the system clock to October 2003, before any of the emails were allegedly sent
2. Ceglia forgot about Daylight Savings Time, creating a physical impossibility in the times of his emails.
3. Ceglia made factual errors in terms of history, including the timing of Thefacebook.com’s initial launch.
“Genuine e-mails” between Zuckerberg and Ceglia, said Facebook’s legal team, contained no reference to Facebook. Instead, they mostly involved requests from Ceglia to give him more time to pay Zuckerberg for his work on the SteetFax site.
“If there is any way I can assure you that I have absolutely every intention of paying you what is owed plus some when we finally catch up to our sales goals it would be appreciated to a level I can’t express in words,” wrote Ceglia to Zuckerberg on Feb. 16, 2004, according to Facebook’s court filings.
The dismissal also said that Ceglia had destroyed external storage drives which contained material relevant to the lawsuit instead of handing them to Facebook.
Facebook dismissed Ceglia as a “career criminal and hustler,” and with Facebook’s Initial Public Offering on the horizon, they’re a prime target for extortion attempts — estimations put its IPO as worth as much as $100 billion. But Ceglia’s legal team isn’t backing down, instead insisting that Ceglia “deserves his day in court, where the jury will resolve this dispute over the ownership of Facebook.”
Facebook’s Dismissal of Paul Ceglia Case
Is Facebook’s “treasure trove” of evidence enough to dismiss Ceglia’s lawsuit? Sound off in the comments below.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, EdStock
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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