Zuckerberg emails surface as evidence in new Facebook lawsuit

As one Facebook lawsuit draws to a close, another re-rears its ugly head.

You may recall Paul Ceglia's story – he of the 'I bought an 84 per cent stake in Facebook in 2004 and now I want my billions of dollars' 2010 lawsuit fame.

Zuckerberg's lawyers will be seeing yet more dollar signs as Ceglia, whose 2010 lawsuit was dismissed, has re-filed his motion with some badass new lawyers and a heap of new evidence.

While some question why it took so long for this 'new evidence' to come to light – it's been almost 10 years, after all – that doesn't change the fact that, if genuine, Marky-Zee could have quite a problem on his hands.

Email trail

More than a dozen emails between Zuckerberg and Ceglia have been submitted as evidence, in which the two men discuss "the face book" in detail.

This detail includes details of how Ceglia has funded the project, discussion of a contract to be signed by both parties, mention of two other students pursuing a similar project and the launch of the original site.

The emails then take a turn – Zuckerberg tells Ceglia that the site is not doing well and that he's thinking of shutting it down, finally offering to return the $2,000 investment which Ceglia says he made in return for a 50 per cent stake.

Facebook says these newly discovered emails are fake, just like they said the contract which Ceglia produced for last year's lawsuit was a fraud too.

Fake bake

But Ceglia's new lawyers are more convinced, having told BusinessInsider that they performed "weeks" of due diligence in order to verify the validity of the Ceglia's claims and evidence.

But if the evidence is found to be genuine by forensic analysis of the emails, contract and computer hard drives, Ceglia's bank account could be about to receive a healthy cash injection.

And Hollywood is no doubt already salivating at the thought of The Social Network 2: Ceglia's Revenge.