Just a day after it was reported that Facebook has shelled out $40000 for securing the site, Paul Ceglia from New York has filed a suit against the company on fraudulent grounds.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s attorneys have been stating that the lawsuit is a false one, and is one of the many attempts to get a major chunk in the company valued at more than $50 billion. Ceglia’s lawyer Jeffrey Lake responded by saying that in today's world, people commonly discuss their most private and important matters by email. As such, allowing defendants' experts to search though and read all of Ceglia's emails since 2003 undoubtedly will give them a view of matters far outside the scope of this litigation and far inside Ceglia's private life, a view to which no one is entitled and that is protected from government prying by the most sacred components of the Constitution.

The legal team at Facebook has also made claims that Ceglia is just an attempt to buy time to tamper with the evidence. The attorneys further stated that as per forensics experts, vital data had been stored in Ceglia’s portable devices attached with his computers but when he was asked to produce the evidence, he said that he had lost them.

The charges made by Ceglia comes a day after Facebook was reportedly hiring people to break into the site and find glitches. So far, the social networking giant has paid close to $40,000 (approx. Rs. 18 lakhs) to people who have managed to flag the issues on the site.

Speaking about the program called ‘Bug Bounty’ Facebook chief security officer Joe Sullivan wrote on his official blog that a couple of years ago, we decided to formalise a 'whitehat' programme to encourage these researchers to look for bugs and report them to us ... A few weeks ago, we took that programme to the next level -- we started paying rewards to those who report bugs to us.

In recent past, Facebook has been mired with privacy issues from across the globe. The issues range from online privacy, child safety as well as security.

Sullivan underscored the issues and wrote on his official blog that if you give us a reasonable time to respond to your report before making any information public and make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations, destruction of data and interruption or degradation of our service during your research, we will not bring any lawsuit against you or ask law enforcement to investigate you.