Some people took online businessman Paul Ceglia seriously when he claimed in a 2010 lawsuit that Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg promised him a 50 percent stake in the company seven year earlier. Sure, it seemed odd that Ceglia would wait so long to bring his case. But he had emails that backed up his allegations, which Ceglia’s onetime lawyers at DLA Piper said they’d spent weeks authenticating. And a Hollywood blockbuster had just been released about Zuckerberg’s frosty relationships with his early collaborators, including some that had wrested settlements from the young billionaire.
Those days are long over. By early 2012, many commentators were calling Ceglia a con artist. Federal prosecutors brought a fraud indictment against Ceglia later that year. And on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Arcara in Buffalo finally got around to dismissing Ceglia’s civil case, adopting a magistrate judge’s earlier conclusion that Ceglia’s purported contract with Zuckerberg was a cut-and-paste job.
