Former eBay government pleads responsible to harassment marketing campaign involving dwell bugs

eBay’s former director of world resiliency, David Harville, pleaded responsible to participating in a weird harassment marketing campaign, which concerned sending dwell cockroaches, spiders, a bloody pig face masks, and different unusual gadgets to a Massachusetts couple (by way of The Guardian). Harville is the final of seven eBay staff to plead responsible to harassing and stalking the pair.

In 2020, the Department of Justice (DOJ) charged former eBay staff Harville, James Baugh, Stephanie Popp, Brian Gilbert, Stephanie Stockwell, Veronica Zea, and Philip Cooke with devising a harassment marketing campaign focusing on Ina and David Steiner, the publishers behind the EcommerceBytes e-newsletter. The group’s scheme was meant to intimidate the Steiners over their publication’s detrimental protection of eBay. It not solely concerned harassing the Steiners on Twitter and doxing their handle on-line, however later escalated to mailing grotesque gadgets to their house and in-person surveillance.

Harville pleaded responsible to 5 felony counts throughout a video name with a Boston federal court docket decide on Thursday. According to the original filing, Harville allegedly took a flight from California to Boston with the intent of driving to the Steiner’s house, breaking into their storage, and attaching a GPS monitoring gadget to their automobile. Harville wasn’t the one higher-up concerned, both — Popp served as eBay’s former senior supervisor of world intelligence, Gilbert was the ex-senior supervisor of particular operations, Baugh labored as eBay’s senior director of security and safety, and Stockwell was a former supervisor for the corporate’s Global Intelligence Center.

In April, Baugh pleaded guilty in reference to the harassment scheme and faces as much as 20 years in jail — his sentencing takes place on September twenty ninth, 2022. Popp, Stockwell, Gilbert, and Cooke all pleaded responsible in 2020. Cooke was subsequently sentenced to 18 months in jail.