In this Oct. 17, 2012, file photo, an eBay sign sits in front of the company's headquarters in San Jose, Calif. On Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020, federal prosecutors said four former eBay Inc. employees had agreed to plead guilty to their roles in a campaign of intimidation that included sending live spiders and cockroaches to the home of a Massachusetts couple who ran an online newsletter highly critical of the auction site. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)
Four former eBay Inc. employees have agreed to plead guilty to their roles in a campaign of intimidation that included sending live spiders and cockroaches to the home of a Massachusetts couple who ran an online newsletter critical of the auction site, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
“Four former employees of #eBay are scheduled to plead guilty on Oct. 8 at 2pm via zoom in federal court in #Boston,” according to a tweet from the official account of the U.S. attorney's office in Massachusetts. “The defendants are charged w/ participating in a cyberstalking campaign that targeted a Massachusetts couple.”
The four expected to plead guilty are Brian Gilbert, 51; Stephanie Popp, 32; Stephanie Stockwell, 26; and Veronica Zea, 26, according to The Boston Globe.
All live in San Jose, California, except for Stockwell, who lives in Redwood City, California.
They are among seven former eBay employees charged in the case, in which the Massachusetts couple had other disturbing items sent to their home, including a funeral wreath and a bloody pig Halloween mask.
They are all charged with conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with a witness. Their lawyers either declined to comment or didn’t immediately return emails seeking comment Wednesday.
The employees also sent pornographic magazines with the husband’s name on them to their neighbor’s house, planned to break into the couple’s garage to install a GPS device on their car, and posted the couple’s names and address online, advertising things like yard sales and encouraging strangers to knock on the door if the pair wasn’t outside, officials said.
The suspects engaged in a “systematic campaign fueled by the resources of a Fortune 500 company to emotionally and psychologically terrorize this middle-aged couple in Natick,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said at a news conference when charges were announced in June.
An internal investigation was launched after San Jose, California-based eBay was notified by law enforcement of “suspicious actions by its security personnel,” company officials wrote in a prepared statement. The employees were ultimately fired, the company said.
Popp was a senior manager of global intelligence at eBay; Gilbert was senior manager of special operations for eBay’s Global Security Team; Stockwell was manager of eBay’s Global Intelligence Center, and Zea was an eBay contractor who worked as an intelligence analyst in the Global Intelligence Center. Authorities say they were working at eBay at the time of the alleged harassment.
Court documents say the couple was targeted after their newsletter published an article in August 2019 about a lawsuit filed by eBay accusing Amazon of poaching its sellers.
Venture capitalists and CEOs are clashing over the future of the internet. Web3 is the tech world's name for a decentralized, blockchain-based internet that runs on cryptocurrency. It was recently the topic of a tweet from Block CEO and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey who wrote that Web3 will not actually be owned by users, and instead be controlled by rich venture capitalists. Dorsey later shared that he was blocked on Twitter by Marc Andreesen, co-founder of VC firm Andreesen Horowitz, which has invested billions of dollars into Web3 and crypto projects. Correspondent for DealBook from the New York Times, Ephrat Livni, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss what this could mean for the future of Web3.
Jim Worden, Chief Investment Officer at Wealth Consulting Group, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he says the period between Christmas and New Year's is difficult to predict due to a lack of institutional volume, with the Omicron variant adding even more uncertainty on Wall Street.
Prices at the pump this year reached a seven-year high, and a new forecast from GasBuddy shared with CNN predicts that gas prices will only continue to rise in 2022 and that the national average could even reach $4.00 a gallon; however, analysts at GasBuddy say anything could happen when it comes to gas prices in the future, as the pandemic has made it difficult to make any predictions about the economy. Consumer Energy Alliance federal policy advisor Michael Zehr joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
The record-breaking success of "Squid Game" on Netflix has many media companies competing to produce, stream, and invest in new content from South Korea. Netflix has spent half a billion dollars on developing Korean content this year, and other streaming services are taking note. Seth Schachner, managing director at StratAmericas and digital business executive, joins Cheddar News to discuss.
Airlines had to ground 2,500 flights in the U.S. on Tuesday, with bad weather and workers out with COVID-19 blamed as the main culprits. Scott Keyes, founder of ScottsCheapFlights.com and author of "Take More Vacations," joined Cheddar News Wrap to discuss how the surge from the omicron variant has been creating havoc in the air travel industry. Keyes noted that a lack of personnel from pilots to gate agents had been exacerbated by the coronavirus, an issue also disrupting labor markets throughout the economy. "Add to that the fact that travel has rebounded far quicker than many analysts and experts predicted, this is why I think you're seeing so many airlines caught a bit flat-footed in having to pare back the schedules they had set months ago," he said.
Barstool Sports CEO Erika Nardini joined Cheddar's Kristen Scholer to discuss plans for the future even as COVID-19 upended Barstool's sponsorship of the Arizona Bowl featuring the Boise State Broncos and the Central Michigan Chippewas due to the spreading omicron variant. "In our case as a company, coronavirus has been a big boom for us," she noted. "We've been able to create a lot of new programming, launch a lot of different personalities, and frankly take share from traditional media, and that's what we've done the entire pandemic." While she admitted to taking a hit on the canceled Bowl game, live events aren't completely off the table for Barstool in 2022. Nardini also talked about potential sports betting expansion following its partnership with Penn National Gaming.
