Australia – Facebook Used to Serve Notice

Talk about progression. You probably don’t wan’t to join this particular Facebook group though! A court in Australia has approved the use of Facebook to notify a couple that they lost their home after defaulting on a $150,000 loan they had borrowed from MKM Capital, a mortgage provider.

The company had been granted a default judgment for the loan but Mark MacCormack, who works for the Canberra law firm Meyer Vandenberg, acting for the lender, decided to go down the social networking route when conventional methods to serve it on Carmel Corbo and Gordon Poyser failed.

A Supreme Court judge in the Australia Capital Territory last Friday approved MacCormack’s application to use Facebook to serve the legally binding documents after several failed attempts to contact the couple at the house and by e-mail. McCormack said the Facebook attempt would help his client’s case that all reasonable steps had been taken to serve the couple. The court acknowledged that he had exhausted conventional methods for serving them.

The matter is expected to settle as early as next week, just in time for Christmas. Nice.