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Two former eBay executives were sentenced to prison yesterday for cyberstalking and harassing journalists whose news coverage had rankled the eBay CEO. One other former eBay employee was sentenced last year, and four others await sentencing.
James Baugh, 47, eBay’s former senior director of safety and security, was sentenced to 57 months in prison and two years of supervised release, a Justice Department press release said yesterday. David Harville, 50, eBay’s former director of global resiliency, was sentenced to two years in prison and two years of supervised release. Baugh and Harville were also ordered to pay fines of $40,000 and $20,000, respectively.
Charges against those two and several other ex-eBay employees were announced in June 2020. The victims were Ina and David Steiner, who operate the website EcommerceBytes and live in Natick, Massachusetts.
The disturbing harassment campaign sent “anonymous and disturbing deliveries to the victims’ home,” including “a book on surviving the death of a spouse, a bloody pig mask, a fetal pig, a funeral wreath, and live insects,” the Justice Department said yesterday. “The harassment also featured Craigslist posts inviting members of the public to experience sexual encounters at the victims’ home.”
There were also “threatening Twitter messages… written as if they had been sent by eBay sellers who were unhappy with the victims’ coverage in the newsletter,” some of which “posted the victims’ home address and threatened to show up at their home,” the Justice Department said.
“On Aug. 15, 2019, Baugh, Harville and a co-conspirator traveled from California to Natick to surveil the victims and install a GPS tracking device on the victims’ car,” the Justice Department said. “The victims spotted the surveillance team and contacted local police. Harville also purchased tools intending to break into the victims’ garage and lied to an eBay investigator who was responding to the Natick Police’s request for assistance.”
Baugh and Harville “deleted digital evidence” after learning of the police investigation, and “Baugh made false statements to police and internal investigators and falsified records intended to throw the police off the trail,” the Justice Department said.
Execs “weaponized eBay’s security department”
FBI Special Agent Joseph Bonavolonta said that Baugh and Harville “demonstrated a clear contempt for the law when they weaponized eBay’s security department to engage in an incredibly disturbing pattern of retaliatory harassment and intimidation to torment this couple, who, thankfully, did not let their fear silence them.”
The harassment campaign lasted from about August 5, 2019, to September 6, 2019. “Senior executives at eBay were frustrated with the newsletter’s tone and content as well as the substance of comments posted beneath the newsletter’s articles. The harassment campaign arose from communications between those senior executives and Baugh, who was eBay’s senior security employee,” the Justice Department said.
Ina Steiner wrote a message for EcommerceBytes readers about the case on Wednesday. “David and I are getting ready to drive to the Moakley Federal Courthouse in Boston tomorrow to tell a judge how we were impacted by two men who confessed this year to cyberstalking and surveilling us in 2019,” she wrote. “We will make at least two more trips into Boston this fall to tell a judge how four other defendants upended our lives and impacted our business before he sentences them.”
Guilty pleas meant the Steiners “were spared the ordeal of the May trial” but also “deprived of the information that would have come out during the proceedings,” she wrote. In May, the Steiners reportedly decided to proceed with their pending lawsuit against eBay after settlement talks failed.
“We believe everyone who played a role should be held accountable,” Steiner wrote. “Last year David and I brought a civil RICO case against those we believe were responsible for the criminal campaign, including former eBay CEO Devin Wenig, CCO [Chief Communications Officer] Steve Wymer, and eBay itself. While it was a difficult decision, we firmly believe it was the right thing to do. We still have many questions, the answers to which would help us heal and possibly regain some trust we’ve lost.”
The civil and criminal cases are both in US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
