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Six Former eBay Employees Charged in Federal Cyberstalking Case Targeting Natick Couple (bostonglobe.com) 75

Posted by msmash from the breaking-news dept.
Six eBay employees including a former police captain in California last year engaged in a relentless campaign of harassment and cyberstalking of a Natick couple that published a newsletter critical of the online retailer, sending items including fly larvae, live spiders, and a bloody pig mask to their home and travelling to Massachusetts to conduct surveillance of the victims in an effort to get them to stop publishing, authorities alleged Monday. From a report: During a news conference, US Attorney Andrew E. Lelling said the defendants conducted a "systematic campaign fueled by the resources of a Fortune 500 company to emotionally and psychologically terrorize this middle-aged couple in Natick." Lelling's words were echoed by Joseph R. Bonavolonta, FBI special agent in charge of the bureau's Boston office, who cited the suspects' "elaborate and relentless campaign to stifle the publishers of an online newsletter out of fear that bad publicity would adversely impact" the company. Court papers identify the defendants as James Baugh, David Harville, Stephanie Popp, Brian Gilbert, Stephanie Stockwell, and Veronica Zea. Lelling said Baugh was arrested in New York. It wasn't immediately clear when he'd make his initial appearance in US District Court in Boston. The remaining defendants, including Gilbert, the former police captain, weren't yet in custody as of noontime Monday.

According to Lellling, the now-fired eBay officials also sent items including pornography to the couple's neighbors in the couple's names, posted listings on Craigslist urging swingers and couples to come to the Natick couples' home to party every night after 10 pm, and created fake social media accounts to send messages to the couple including one that said, "do I have your attention now?" A complaint filed in the case by FBI Special Agent Mark Wilson said the "campaign included: sending anonymous, threatening communications to the Victims; ordering unwanted and disturbing deliveries to their home, including funeral wreaths and books on surviving the loss of a spouse; and BAUGH, HARVILLE, Zea, and Popp travelling to Natick to surveil the Victims at their home and in their community." It wasn't immediately clear if any of the suspects had retained lawyers to speak on their behalf. According to the complaint, two eBay officials, identified in court papers only as Executive 1 and Executive 2, followed the couple's newsletter with interest. In April 2019, Executive 2 told Executive 1 via text message, "We are going to crush this lady," referring to the woman who put out the newsletter along with her husband, the complaint said.
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Six Former eBay Employees Charged in Federal Cyberstalking Case Targeting Natick Couple More

Six Former eBay Employees Charged in Federal Cyberstalking Case Targeting Natick Couple

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  • Former Employees (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OverlordQ ( 264228 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @11:55AM (#60185620) Journal

    Did they get fired for what they did? Or because they got caught?

    • Re:Former Employees (Score:5, Informative)

      by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @11:59AM (#60185636)

      Here is a non-subscription article with some backstory:

      https://boston.cbslocal.com/20... [cbslocal.com]

      It says "All of the employees were fired by eBay following an investigation. Lelling said the company cooperated with investigators." So somewhere at the halfway point I would say.

      More concerning is a Fortune 500 company executives getting their fee-fee's hurt by someone's newsletter. I would like to see more executives investigated and charged for this but that may be wishing too much.

      • Re:Former Employees (Score:5, Funny)

        by lazarus ( 2879 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @12:09PM (#60185702) Journal

        I was probably born naive, but wouldn't a newsletter critical of your organization prompt you to make positive changes? How do you get to be an executive at a very successful company without an attitude of "continuous incremental improvement"?

        You do the best you can and ignore those who are critical for the sake of hating on something, no?

        • You would think so but we have bred a culture and system of, in my opinion, corporate cruelty and recklessness. If those executives felt a newsletter could affect a quarterly earnings report or their own positions they are not incentivized to implement positive changes. Who knows how much of this takes place where no one is caught.

          • ... we have bred a culture and system of, in my opinion, corporate cruelty and recklessness.

            Try "societal cruelty and recklessness". It also manifests itself with corporations, because they're run by our generations of sociopaths.

            Was it a corporation that set people against a bike rider for passing by a crime scene on a different day?

            Is it corporations that SWAT teams to the homes of people they don't like? (well, yea, that has happened too, but not as often)

            These sociopaths just happened to have some corporate money to spend on stalking their victims.

        • Nah they're psychopaths just like the cops. People ask the police to stop treating people as enemy combatants and they double down and pepper spray a 7 year old. https://www.theguardian.com/us... [theguardian.com]

        • wouldn't a newsletter critical of your organization prompt you to make positive changes

          Only if the criticism is valid (and articulated convincingly).

          ignore those who are critical for the sake of hating

          Yep.

        • Re:Former Employees (Score:5, Informative)

          by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @12:43PM (#60185894)

          Obvious joke: You're clearly not an executive.

          Serious response: I think you're neglecting how nasty office politics and power-plays can get. If the reward for backstabbing and office-politicking is a promotion, then it stands to reason that you're going to get a collection of very slimy people near the top of a company's hierarchy.

          And of course, you're also thinking like a rational, sane person. These people are obviously sociopaths, bordering on psychopaths, from the little I've read about this case. The level of harassment and obsession over this couple is almost hard to believe.

        • >but wouldn't a newsletter critical of your organization prompt you to make positive changes?

          It depends on the content. There's a whole lot of bullshit written about my employer by people just out to make trouble, or more likely tweak the stock price.

          Sometimes it's insightful and that stuff is taken seriously. Generally as an employee, when an outsider states the obvious it's easier to get the message internalized by the uppity ups than by ranting about it from the inside.

        • Because when you make profit your overarching goal then any methods are considered allowable, even those forbidden by law. In a group context, it has been shown that an individual's person sense of morals and ethics can be subsumed by that of the group.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          Short term focus on stock options is how it works. Insatiable greed and a myopic focus on share price and anything that threatens it to the point of paranoia. They were unfit to be executives, did not have the right psychological profit to handle the stresses and eBay is fully liable for their actions done on company time. It should have warranted a further audit of eBay to see if this behaviour had spread beyond the people involved and was endemic to the corporation. Check all those executives the corrupt

      • The 6 employees (Score:5, Informative)

        by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @01:07PM (#60186006) Homepage

        Thanks. From the article:

        James Baugh, 45, of San Jose, California, eBay’s former director of safety and security and former eBay director of global resiliency David Harville, 48, of New York City, were among the six charged Monday.

        Also charged were Stephanie Popp, 32, of San Jose; Stephanie Stockwell, 26, of Redwood City, Calif.; Veronica Zeak, 26, of San Jose; and Brian Gilbert, 51, of San Jose. Each is charged with conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses.

        Popp was eBay’s senior manager of global intelligence, Stockwell was the company’s manager of global intelligence center (GIC), Zea was a contractor who worked as an intelligence analyst within the GIC, and Gilbert was a senior manager of special operations for eBay’s global security team.

        Gilbert is also a former police captain.

        It says another 2 execs above Baugh are named in the complaint. So maybe more to come.

    • Well common sense tells me that unless you're caught, you won't get fired. But then again I'm only of average intelligence.

    • Tje bigger question is if this is part of the ebay culture. I had a really bad experience with ebay 7 years ago and had to take them to small claims court. This article is just on a whole other level of insane though...

    • Did they get fired for what they did? Or because they got caught?

      I'm curious too. If these people did these things because they were told, they won't be the only people facing criminal charges. But if they weren't told, why in the world would they go all out to do this? It takes resources and time to do all those harrassing things.

      What the article fails to mention is what did the couple write that's got eBay (or its employees) so excited that they commit criminal acts to keep them silent.

  • I don't think eBay can get out of this without major cost. A good lawyer will make sure that the company itself will be held responsible for everything. It's not as if it was employees doing this in their spare time.

  • Was this an isolated incident? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @12:08PM (#60185700)

    Getting six people involved for a first-time operation of this scale seems hard to believe that it was their first rodeo.

    • Re:Was this an isolated incident? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by lessSockMorePuppet ( 6778792 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @12:11PM (#60185724) Homepage

      They had a cop to run the show.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Definitely not an isolated incident, from the article:

      It is alleged that the very same group intended then to have Gilbert, a former Santa Clara police captain, approach the victims with an offer to help stop the harassment that the defendants were secretly causing, in an effort to promote good will towards eBay, generate more favorable coverage in the newsletter, and identify the individuals behind the anonymous comments

      Pay special attention to that last part - that means they had patsies set up, probably other people being harassed, such that they could pit their various targets against one another (that, or they had identified someone to throw under the bus.) In either case, it also shows they had the ability to forge logs and control the entire logistic chain from the guys forging the logs through handing them off to police.

  • ..and now I have the proof. Any company that would employ 'people' (using the word as loosely as possible, here) like these at such a high level must be at least as cancerous as Facebook. Die, die, beast of hell Ebay, die.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      Seems to be par for the course. Tesla set some goons on people it suspected of whistleblowing.
  • Criticize eBay and suddenly a bunch of shit arrives from eBay. Maybe they should have been ordering their grief packages from Amazon or Alibaba. Slightly less self-incriminating.

  • This is why freedom of speech is so important (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @12:34PM (#60185872)
    Real freedom of speech, not the selfish half-assed version being promoted today. Because once you leave the domain of "I disapprove of what you say, but will fight to the death to defend your right to say it," and enter the domain of "I disapprove of what you say, and will do whatever I can to thwart your attempts to tell it to others," people start to think it's OK to do B.S. like what these people did.

    If you defend freedom of speech only when you agree with what's being said, you're just promoting your self-interest, not upholding a principle.

    • You've redefined freedom of speech to be something it is not.

      I agree that what these ex-employees did is not at all okay, but what you're saying is that "real" freedom of speech means denying others the right to respond as they choose to what you are saying. As such, what you're actually describing is the fictitious and dangerously misguided "freedom to be heard", not the very real and necessary freedom of speech.

      I am firmly in the camp of "I may disapprove of what you say, but will fight to the death to de

  • Does anyone have a link to their newsletter?

  • I only knew Natick from solving crossword puzzles.

  • Gotta love those titles (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Gotta love those titles: "Director of Global Resiliency" "Senior Manager of Global Intelligence" "Senior Manager of Special Operations."
  • Organizing to commit a crime with anyone else makes it a "conspiracy," with far greater penalties.

  • eBay CEO zapped (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "The Company noted that the internal investigation also examined what role, if any, the Company’s CEO at the time of the incident, Devin Wenig, may have had in this matter. The internal investigation found that, while Mr. Wenig’s communications were inappropriate, there was no evidence that he knew in advance about or authorized the actions that were later directed toward the blogger and her husband. However, as the Company previously announced, there were a number of considerations leading to h
  • Since the BG is not friendly to incognito mode, and since it's not even the source of the article, try this link instead.

    https://www.justice.gov/usao-m... [justice.gov]

  • Why isn't there action moving ahead on Ebay?

    These six ass-clowns didn't just get together on a Natick "Swingers and Dorks" party night and hatch a plan to harass this couple out of their selfless love for Ebay.

    Ebay bears responsibility too - pretty clearly, in that it's not "one rogue employee" who did this whole thing.

    If this occurred while they were in Ebay's employ, then Ebay bought and paid for it.

    If after their termination, then follow the money...

  • Karma (Score:3)

    by surfcow ( 169572 ) on Monday June 15, 2020 @03:27PM (#60186682) Homepage

    These execs wanted things taken care of, quietly. Now there will be a great big federal lawsuit.
    These "security professionals" used fascist tactics. Now they are going to live in a federal prison.
    This woman stood up to them and all their nastiness. And they are going to pay her a big, expen$ive apology.

    Karma.

    • There is no such thing as 'karma' in western capitalism (and this is not fascism). Perhaps one or two of them will spend a few months in a minimum-security prison.

      If I were one of this couple, I would be extraordinarily cautious for the next several years. You do not challenge a party member in a communist state, and you do not challenge senior members of the management class in an industrial-capitalist state without bad things happening.

      Yet I, stupidly and resolutely, remain a libertarian.

  • The downside of tech becoming such a massive industry is that all these characters now spill into it
  • Thse employees are can expect a windfall for not ratting out those the executives who ordered the actions. Probably set for life in exchange for a few months or years in a country club federal jail.

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