Former eBay executive pleads guilty to harassment campaign involving live insects

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

In 2020, the Division of Justice (DOJ) charged former eBay workers Harville, James Baugh, Stephanie Popp, Brian Gilbert, Stephanie Stockwell, Veronica Zea, and Philip Cooke with devising a harassment marketing campaign concentrating 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 unfavourable protection of eBay. It not solely concerned harassing the Steiners on Twitter and doxing their tackle on-line, however later escalated to mailing grotesque gadgets to their residence and in-person surveillance.

Harville pleaded responsible to 5 felony counts throughout a video name with a Boston federal court docket choose on Thursday. In accordance with the unique submitting, Harville allegedly took a flight from California to Boston with the intent of driving to the Steiner’s residence, breaking into their storage, and attaching a GPS monitoring system 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 International Intelligence Middle.

In April, Baugh pleaded responsible 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.