Late last summer, an executive at eBay sent a series of text messages to James Baugh, who was the company’s senior director of safety and security at the time. “If we are ever going to take her down..now is the time,” the first message read, according to a screengrab of the thread. Later, the executive emphasized, “I want her DONE.” Baugh responded that he had a plan. And then he allegedly set it in motion.
A sweeping criminal complaint released Monday by the Massachusetts US Attorney’s Office details the unlikely, appalling consequences of that exchange. It charges six former eBay employees and contractors, including Baugh, with a cyberstalking campaign against the publishers of an ecommerce news site that covered the company. The objective: Get the publishers—a married couple living in Natick, Massachusetts—to stop writing negative stories about eBay, and figure out the identity of one particularly vociferous commenter. Their alleged methods were outrageous, as were their attempts to cover it up.
The harassment campaign was planned in a series of meetings, prosecutors say. In one, Baugh showed the assembled team a clip, according to a confidential witness cited in the complaint, of the movie Johnny Be Good, in which pranksters deliver increasingly absurd and unwelcome items to people’s homes. A brainstorm allegedly followed: What could they send to their victims that would terrify them? In a separate meeting, the complaint says, Baugh and a few others charted out a complementary social media strategy: They would send anonymous tweets and DMs to the couple, pretending to be angry eBay sellers and claiming responsibility for the deliveries. They would also eventually doxx the couple by publicly posting their home address.
“The result, as alleged in the complaint, was a systematic campaign, fueled by the resources of a Fortune 500 company, to emotionally and psychologically terrorize this middle-aged couple in Natick with the goal of deterring them from writing bad things online about eBay,” US attorney Andrew Lelling said in a press conference Monday morning. While the complaint does not identify the victims by name, it cites specific headlines and stories that indicate that Baugh and his team were after the husband and wife publishers of EcommerceBytes.
The harassment, prosecutors say, was not the only endgame. In a grotesque bit of 3-D chess, the eBay team allegedly responsible for the campaign planned to eventuall