Two males, who beforehand labored at eBay, have been sentenced to jail after admitting their position in a cyberstalking marketing campaign that focused the editor and writer of a publication that criticised the corporate.
47-year-old James Baugh of San Jose and David Harville of Las Vegas, together with different co-conspirators at eBay, launched a harassment marketing campaign towards Ina and David Steiner, a husband-and-wife workforce who produced the EcommerceBytes web site and publication.
Baugh, who on the time was eBay’s senior director of security and safety. and 50-year-old Harville, who was the corporate’s director of worldwide resiliency, had engaged in an intimidation marketing campaign towards the Steiners.
The couple behind EcommerceBytes had seemingly raised the ire of Baugh, Harville, and others inside eBay, as a result of they’d regularly publish articles scrutinising the behaviour of the ecommerce big.
In August 2019, issues got here to a head after the publication revealed an article about litigation involving eBay, and two members of eBay’s govt management workforce despatched messages saying it was time to “take down” the editor of EcommerceBytes.
The harassment marketing campaign launched by the group of eBay workers included:
- sending nameless, threatening messages
- delivering a funeral wreath, a masks of a bloody pig’s face, reside bugs, and a e-book on surviving the lack of a partner
- sending pornography addressed to the Steiners, however delivered to their neighbours
- posting adverts for intercourse events on the couple’s dwelling on Craigslist
- touring throughout the nation to spy on the Steiners, and making an attempt to plant a GPS tracker on their automotive
Fearing for his or her lives, the Steiners put in surveillance cameras to watch anybody
approaching their dwelling.
When police started to research, Baugh is claimed to have referred to as a gathering together with his co-conspirators the place they plotted to destroy proof of their involvement and draw consideration away from eBay. In accordance with the Steiners, a faux file was created, containing fabricated proof and a phony “individuals of curiosity” file.
In the end former eBay workers Philip Cooke, Brian Gilbert, Stephanie Popp, Veronica Zea, and Stephanie Stockwell pleaded responsible for his or her half within the cyberstalking plot. Baugh and Harville initially denied the allegations towards them, earlier than pleading responsible earlier this 12 months.
Cooke was sentenced to 18 months in jail again in July 2021.
On the time of writing Gilbert, Popp, Zea, and Stockwell are nonetheless awaiting sentencing.
However now James Baugh has been despatched to jail for 57 months, adopted by two years of supervised launch. His co-conspirator David Harville has been jailed for 2 years with two years of supervised launch. Harville has moreover been ordered to pay a $20,000 effective.
