Yahoo has been awarded $610 million in a court judgment against scammers who tricked people into believing they had won prizes in a lottery Yahoo was running, the company announced.
Yahoo filed the lawsuit in 2008, after a Nigerian and Thai group invented the fake lottery scam to steal users' passwords and other personal data, including credit cards and Social Security numbers.
In the lawsuit, Yahoo alleged that nearly 11.7 million emails were sent from December 2006 to May 2009, promising a lottery prize to the receivers.
The $610 million would definitely do good for Yahoo, which reported a sharp drop in earnings and revenue, with some $2.9 billion in cash reserves in its latest earnings report.
It's unlikely, however, that Yahoo will ever collect the money from the ID thieves, as they will probably be hard to find.