Six former employees of the site sent threatening messages and deliveries to a couple after the e-commerce newsletter they published wrote about a lawsuit involving eBay.
BOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Six eBay employees mounted a cyberstalking campaign — including sending boxes of live cockroaches and a Halloween mask of a bloody pig’s face — against a couple who ran an online e-commerce newsletter, according to charges filed by federal prosecutors on Monday.
Unhappy with the newsletter’s coverage of eBay, the employees, none of whom now work at the company, barraged the couple with threatening emails and sent disturbing deliveries, including a funeral wreath and a book on how to survive the death of a spouse, said Andrew E. Lelling, the United States attorney for Massachusetts, in a news conference on Monday. Several of the employees drove to the couple’s home to spy on them, he said.
“They were not merely unhappy, they were enraged,” Mr. Lelling said, describing how one former eBay executive told a fellow executive in a text message that he wanted to “crush” the woman in the couple, who live in Natick, Mass., a Boston suburb. The result, Mr. Lelling said, “was a systematic campaign, fueled by the resources of a Fortune 500 company, to emotionally and psychologically terrorize this middle-aged couple in Natick with the goal of deterring them from writing bad things online about eBay.”
Prosecutors charged the six people with conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses. Among them, two former eBay officers — James Baugh, the company’s former senior director of safety and security, and David Harville, the company’s former director of global resiliency — were arrested on Monday morning.
