Ex-eBay execs jailed for cyberstalking web critics Two now-former eBay executives who pleaded guilty to cyberstalking charges this year have been sent down and fined tens of thousands of dollars. James Baugh, ex-senior director of safety and security at the internet tat bazaar, was sentenced to nearly five years – 57 months – behind bars, plus two years of supervised release …
The difference here is the nature of the charges, which for these two, are of a non-financial nature.
From what I've seen, execs facing finance-related charges, typically fraud and conspiracy, tend to get off, unless (a) their executive rank is relatively low-on-the-totem-pole, or (b) the amount defrauded is low.
Execs facing fraud charges for really, really big amounts tend to get off, unless they've angered someone with both a lot of money and power. That may be because the execs with the most potential for major-money fraud (usually insider trading) are those highest on the totem pole, and consequently were already rich and had rich and powerful friends with influence to help them. It also may be that because they are rich, they can afford extremely effective defense attorneys.
Stalking is not considered "white-collar crime".
It is unusual, and I'm glad to see it. When the story originally broke, it looked like eBay higher-ups had gone to some trouble to make the younger participates (Popp, Stockwell, and Zea, all of whom pled guilty after charges were filed) the scapegoats for the whole thing. At least one of them had an inflated title to suggest she had oversight of the operation.
It appears neither prosecutors nor juries were persuaded by those maneuvers.
There are just two places where it is mistyped as "Bough", but why not try the Send news / corrections link to get it corrected...?
"Defendants Wenig and Wymer provided the other defendants with carte blanche authority to terminate the reporting of the Steiners by whatever means necessary."
Good luck with that. It's one thing proving that somebody did something, it's another thing entirely proving somebody else instructed them to do it. While you may have grounds to suspect that the big boys told them to do it and ran away you still need to find evidence of that.
They were at a minimum wilfully negligent in not establishing what had been done.
Hopefully the civil case will bring more facts to the surface, and the criminal prosecution they deserve will follow.
I'm (a bit) surprised that ebay hasn't gone straight to a substantial settlement to get ahead of it, and totally thrown the execs to the wolves.
Being called nasty names online is just par for the course (for women, probably for POC, nonconforming genders, as well) BUT the heavy penalties were for sending them physical objects, trying to smear their reputations or interfere with their livelihoods, threats of every sort of harm. If they can prove that their work supervisors knew about, encouraged or abetted it, that whole department of the company needs to get removed.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
