Facebook says man claiming half the company is a career criminal
The claim is that 18-year-old Mark Zuckerberg signed away half of "the Facebook" for $1000 after another $1000 deal to write computer code in connection with photographs of street junctions in Boston
“The evidence defendants have gathered to date corroborates Zuckerberg’s sworn statements and confirms that Ceglia’s documents are forgeries,” say Zuckerberg and Facebook in the filing to federal court in New York.
In 2001, Ceglia was contracted by a Massachusetts company, StreetDelivery.com, to photograph street intersections. In 2003, Ceglia started his own company, StreetFax, and tried to replicate StreetDelivery's business.
He posted an ad on Craigslist, he claims, looking for programmers. The lowest bidder was Zuckerberg, then an 18-year-old student at Harvard.
Ceglia says the two signed a two-page contract at a hotel in Boston. According to the copy of the contract attached to the complaint, Ceglia agreed to pay Zuckerberg $1,000 to write computer code for StreetFax. In a side deal Ceglia claims that Zuckerberg persuaded him to invest another $1,000 in a project Zuckerberg called "The Face Book."
In return, Ceglia was to get a 50 percent stake in Zuckerberg's project, plus, Ceglia claims, an additional 1 percent interest for each day after Jan. 1, 2004, that the launch of The Face Book was delayed.
Lisa Simpson, a lawyer for Facebook, said at a court hearing on July 20 last year that Zuckerberg did sign some contract with Ceglia. He did NOT sign over an interest in Facebook to Ceglia. He didn't even think of Facebook until a year later.
The Facebook lawyers now say Ceglia appears to have taken page 2 of the signed StreetFax contract and appended it to a doctored version of page 1, which Ceglia has edited by adding references to “The Face Book.” The emails Ceglia quotes in his Amended Complaint do not exist , say the Facebook lawyers.
"They are complete fabrications. Ceglia is a professional con artist. A comprehensive background investigation conducted by the nationally renowned investigative firm Kroll Associates, Inc. established that Ceglia is a career criminal who has engaged in fraud, subterfuge and falsification of documents.
"From his 1997 felony conviction through his 2009 arrest for scamming New Yorkers, Ceglia has a long record of criminal and fraudulent behavior that spans decades."
Asked by the New York Times some weeks ago to produce the original documents backing up Ceglia's complaint, his lawyer Robert Brownlie, of DLA Piper refused. He said, "That will come out during the course of litigation. Anyone who claims this case is fraudulent and brought by a scam artist will come to regret those claims."