Former eBay Manager Caught In Deranged Cyberstalking Scandal Gets 18 Months in Prison

A former eBay safety supervisor has been sentenced to 18 months in jail after serving to to orchestrate a batshit insane plot to terrorize a Massachusetts couple who sometimes criticized the corporate of their e-newsletter.

Philip Cooke, 56, is the primary of seven former high-level eBay staff to be sentenced in connection to the frilly cyberstalking case. Cooke pled responsible to conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and witness tampering late final yr. Four different members of the workforce have additionally pled responsible to related prices and await sentencing, while two others face trial.

A former police captain in Santa Clara, Calif., Cooke labored as senior supervisor of safety operations for eBay’s Global Security Team throughout the entire fiasco and has since admitted to being at a number of conferences whereby he and his co-conspirators mentioned a multi-phase plan of weird ways to intimate their targets.

Those targets have been Ina and David Steiner, the publishers of an e-commerce newsletter that has sometimes written about and criticized eBay’s enterprise practices. The criticism apparently so enraged the corporate’s management that, in 2019, a scheme was cooked up by safety executives to frighten the bloggers straight.

That scheme concerned mailing the middle-aged couple macabre gadgets like reside spiders and cockroaches, pornographic magazines, threatening letters, a funereal wreath, and a bloody pig masks like some shit out of Saw. The workforce additionally used on-line sock puppet accounts to ship nameless, threatening messages to their victims, whereas additionally conspiring to affix a GPS monitoring gadget to the couple’s automotive. The obvious ringleader, former Senior Director of Safety & Security and resident psycho James Baugh, additionally internally mentioned sending a “Samoan gang” to the Steiners’ home.

The boardroom crew from hell subsequently tried to cowl up the entire horrendous shit they’d simply accomplished, which is why a lot of them have now been convicted of witness tampering.

Ars Technica writes that Cooke was truly promoted by eBay and given a major pay bump some ten months after the stalking marketing campaign started and shortly earlier than the complete episode grew to become public in mid-2020.

Cooke’s legal professional has apparently blamed all of this abhorrent habits on a “drinking culture” at eBay, which is a bizarre protection since most individuals simply get giggly or loud once they’re drunk, sometimes steering away from schemes to torture journalists.

Understandably, the Steiners are now suing eBay. The couple filed a big go well with in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts looking for damages for emotional trauma amongst different issues, wherein they accuse the corporate of getting “engaged in a coordinated effort to intimidate, threaten to kill, torture, terrorize, stalk and silence the Steiners, in order to stifle their reporting on eBay.”

The sick joke of the complete episode is that each one this terribleness was impressed by eBay’s obvious concern of dangerous press, which they now have greater than loads of.