Facebook Fugitive Paul Ceglia Arrested in Ecuador, Say US Prosecutors

The New York man who spent about 3-1/2 years as a criminal subsequent to being accused of attempting to cheat Facebook author Mark Zuckerberg out of half of the web based life organization has been captured in Ecuador and might be removed, US prosecutors said on Thursday.

Paul Ceglia, 45, a wood pellet sales representative from Wellsville in upstate New York, had been missing since March 2015, when he evacuated his electronic lower leg wrist trinket and vanished with his better half, two kids and a puppy.

Ceglia fled under two months previously his planned preliminary in Manhattan government court on mail misrepresentation and wire misrepresentation charges, over his asserted fashioning of reports to coerce Facebook and Zuckerberg.

In a letter to US District Judge Vernon Broderick, prosecutors said Ceglia was captured in Ecuador on Thursday morning and is relied upon to show up by Friday in a court in Quito, the nation's capital.

Prosecutors said they will refresh Broderick as they take in more about Ceglia's removal procedures.

The criminal case emerged from Ceglia's lead identified with a 2010 common claim he had recorded against Zuckerberg.

Ceglia asserted that Zuckerberg had, while an understudy at Harvard University, marked a 2003 contract giving him half of an arranged long range informal communication site that later progressed toward becoming Facebook.

US District Judge Richard Arcara in Buffalo expelled Ceglia's claim after another judge said the agreement was doctored.

The market estimation of Menlo Park, California-based Facebook is currently near $500 billion , and Forbes magazine said Zuckerberg's own total assets is about $64.8 billion.

Ceglia was criminally charged in November 2012. News of his capture was before revealed by WGRZ TV in Buffalo, around 85 miles (137 km) northwest of Wellsville.

Robert Ross Fogg, a legal advisor for Ceglia in the criminal case, in a Thursday telephone meet said he was "mitigated" that Ceglia seemed to have been situated without occurrence, and was "trusting that he and his family are sheltered."

He likewise said there remained a "solid case" for Ceglia's safeguard, and that Ceglia's claimed concurrence with Zuckerberg "genuinely was an agreement."

Facebook did not quickly react to a demand for input.

The case is US v. Ceglia, US District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 12-cr-00876.