Several former eBay employees allegedly cyberstalked, threatened, and harassed two journalists who spoke critically of the company in a newsletter.
Six former eBay employees, including members of its security team, have been accused of an extended campaign of harassment against a married couple who criticized the company in a newsletter. Two of the alleged conspirators have been arrested and face federal charges of cyberstalking.
The charges have been leveled against six eBay executives, led by James Baugh, eBay‘s then-senior director of safety & security, and David Harville, then-director of global resiliency. The targets of this campaign are a married couple, the editor and publisher of an online newsletter covering e-commerce. The two had apparently written critically of eBay in the past, as had several of the readers in their comment section.
An affidavit from a Special Agent from the FBI Boston Division’s Cybercrimes Squad details the exact things the Sinister Six here did to this couple. And it’s pretty wild, I’m not going to lie. First up, these daffy jokers apparently seriously referred to their campaign of harassment as an “op” and their victims as “targets,” and cautioned each other to delete messages relating to it or “we will all get fired.”
For starters, they apparently got all their ideas from movies, specifically films like Old School and Johnny Be Good, because they resorted to sending nasty things to the couple’s house, including (but not limited to):
As if this wasn’t enough, the employees traveled to where the couple lived and repeatedly cased their house while planning further acts from a local hotel. They drove past the house multiple times. At one point they even planned to break into the couple’s garage and install a tracking system on their car, but this effort apparently fell through because the local police department, tipped by the couple’s complaints, placed an undercover officer in front of the victim’s house.
