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Photo: By Cristiano Tomás – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
Two former executives of e-commerce and auction company eBay were sentenced to prison Thursday for orchestrating a campaign of intimidation against voices critical of the company and sending them grim objects home.
Jim Baugh, former senior director of security at eBay, and David Harville, former director of global resilience, were sentenced to 57 and 24 months in prison, respectively.
Shipments to the victims’ homes included a real pig fetus, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath, a box of live cockroaches, and a book on how to get over the death of a spouse.
In addition, the former eBay workers also sent pornographic material in the name of the couple they wanted to intimidate but to their neighbors’ homes, so that they were the ones who received the packages but saw the victims’ names on them.
The couple subject to harassment are residents of Natick, Massachusetts, and jointly edit an e-commerce electronic newsletter that in August 2019 was highly critical of eBay’s legal troubles, at which point the employees decided to initiate the harassment campaign.
In addition to sending shady items, the then-employees – none of whom still work for the San Jose-based company today – harassed the couple on Twitter both publicly and with private messages.
They also posted a public message on the popular Craigslist portal claiming that the victims were swingers and that they were looking for other people to have sex with.
Finally, these two and other ex-workers made several visits to the affected parties’ address and in one of them tried to gain access to the garage to place a GPS tracking device in their vehicle.
