According to reports, Canadian Adam Guerbuez duped Facebook members into revealing their passwords to send out his messages.
Facebook has hired lawyers in Canada to enforce the judgment, in a US court, against Guerbuez.
Sam O'Rourke, senior counsel at Facebook, said: "We want to make it clear that we are not just doing this for the PR value.
"We would like to have the message out there to spammers that we are not going to sit by and let them have that activity on our sites that is illegal and annoying to our users."
Max Kelly, Facebook's director of security, said in a blog: "The bad guys behind those messages are always looking to find new ways to annoy people and Facebook's users have been among those targeted. We don't take this affront to our users lying down.
"Does Facebook expect to quickly collect $873m and share the proceeds in some way with our users? Alas, no. It's unlikely that Geurbez and Atlantis Blue Capital could ever honour the judgment rendered against them (though we will certainly collect everything we can). But we are confident that this award represents a powerful deterrent to anyone and everyone who would seek to abuse Facebook and its users."
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