This isn't the social networking company's first big win against a spammer.

A little less than a year ago, $873 million in a separate federal lawsuit against spammers for violating the CAN-SPAM Act. The suit charged that Adam Guerbuez, Atlantis Blue Capital and 25 others falsely obtained log-in information for Facebook users and then sent spam to those users' friends.

Most analysts interviewed today said they have little faith that either judgement will help curtail spam on social networking sites.

"As long as there is money in spam and malware, there will always be people pursuing it as a vocation," Olds said. "It beats flipping burgers and we can't all be cool video game designers. Several years ago, there were huge fines handed down [against] e-mail spammers. Have you seen a big drop off in e-mail spam and phishing attempts? I would argue that we haven't."

And analysts say spam is a fast growing problem for sites like Facebook and Twitter. If it continues, many seen their user base explode over the past year could quickly find many of those users leaving.