David Javier, eBay's former director of global resilience, admitted to being involved in a bizarre harassment campaign, including sending live cockroaches, spiders, bloody pig face masks and other strange items to a couple in Massachusetts. Javier was the last of seven eBay employees who admitted harassing and stalking the couple.
In 2020, the Department of Justice (DOJ) accused former eBay employees Javier, James bow, Stephanie Pope, Brian Gilbert, Stephanie Stockwell, Veronica Zea and Philip Cook of designing harassment activities against ina and David Steiner, publishers of ecommercebyte e-commerce publications. The organization's plan is to intimidate the Steiner couple because their publications give negative coverage to eBay.
The plan involved not only harassing the Steiner couple on Twitter and posting their addresses online, but also upgrading to mailing weird items to their homes, as well as offline surveillance and harassment.
On Thursday, Javier pleaded guilty to five felony charges in a video call with a federal court judge in Boston. According to the original court documents, Javier flew from California to Boston to drive to Steiner's house, break into their garage and install GPS tracking devices in their cars. Javier is not the only high-level figure involved - Pope was a senior manager of eBay's global intelligence department, Gilbert was a senior manager of special operations department, Bao was a senior director of eBay's safety and security department, and Stockwell was the manager of the company's global intelligence center.
In April this year, Bao pleaded guilty to crimes related to the harassment plan and faced up to 20 years' imprisonment. His sentence was handed down on September 29, 2022. Pope, Stockwell, Gilbert and cook all pleaded guilty in 2020, of which cook was sentenced to 18 months in prison at the earliest.