Cyberstalked By eBay - Act 1: The Newsletter

Join me to hear how eBay mercilessly cyberstalked EcommerceBytes, an eCommerce related newsletter founded by eCommerce experts and authors Ira and David Steiner. This is eCrimeBytes.com Season 3 Episode 4, Cyberstalked By eBay – Act 1: The Newsletter.

Sources:

Transcript:

00:00:10:00 – 00:00:33:11
Keith
What’s up, you crazy bastards! Welcome to this week’s episode of eCrimeBytes. This is where I research the court documentation and roast the criminals so you don’t have to. All right, so this week we have season three, episode four. Jesus. This case did not sound real when I first read it. It’s called cyberstalked by eBay.

00:00:33:15 – 00:00:55:36
Keith
And you’re probably wondering, how would a company cyber stalk somebody? Here you’re about to find out. All right. So while it was eBay, the company, there’s a bunch of individuals that work inside eBay that did this crime. And I’m going to introduce them all to you now. So that way you can kind of get the lay of the land of what they did inside eBay.

00:00:55:36 – 00:01:12:53
Keith
So it makes sense when I start talking about their crimes. Okay. So we have a handful of individuals. We have the leader of the group. His name is James Baugh. He is senior of senior director of safety and security. And he ran eBay’s Global Security and

00:01:12:53 – 00:01:16:04
Keith
resiliency group. And I’m going to put a picture of Baugh on your screen now.

00:01:16:09 – 00:01:24:57
Keith
He’s on the left hand side there. And this is just like a social media profile type of picture. I got another

00:01:24:57 – 00:01:38:51
Keith
picture. That’s the one I’m going to put on your screen now. And that’s him walking in a suit. And he’s walking in a suit because he’s going into court for this case that I’m bringing you today. So, surprise, surprise, they were caught in the end.

00:01:38:51 – 00:01:41:42
Keith
And this is just a picture of him walking into court when they were

00:01:41:42 – 00:01:59:58
Keith
caught. So if I can go back to the first picture here, I said there was James Baugh, the left hand side. There’s this gentleman on the right hand side, David Harville. He worked for Jim James. Jim, he goes by Jim, too. So he also worked for Jim Baugh.

00:02:00:03 – 00:02:15:18
Keith
He was director of Global Resiliency. He reported directly to Baugh. And a side note, he also owned a tactical weapons online store. And I just kind of rifled through it real quick. It looks like there are some like special made knives and things like that in

00:02:15:18 – 00:02:22:53
Keith
there. So that’s two individuals. Now we have Stephanie. let me stop for a second.

00:02:22:58 – 00:02:42:29
Keith
I have a picture of Harville going into court, too. So let me put that on your screen. And I know you probably look at this going, hey, this isn’t helpful. He’s wearing a fucking mask and he’s bald. He could be Jeff Bezos, for all I know, with this picture. And that is true. So that’s why I gave you the first picture of off of the social media one, because it’s the only one I found without a mask on his face.

00:02:42:29 – 00:02:45:50
Keith
And you could kind of tell, you know, who he

00:02:45:50 – 00:03:01:38
Keith
is. All right. So our third individual here, this is Stephanie Popp, and I don’t have a picture of Stephanie. I looked I found a couple that could have been but I don’t like could have been. I don’t want to accidentally grab somebody else’s picture, so I’m not going to show any picture.

00:03:01:43 – 00:03:19:05
Keith
She was a senior manager of global intelligence and also either directly or indirectly Baugh’s chief of staff. So she’s pretty high up because she’s his chief of staff and he’s the ringleader of the group.

00:03:19:05 – 00:03:24:01
Keith
Okay. Now this is going to be mind blowing. I’m putting a picture on the screen of a police officer and you’re like, Who is this?

00:03:24:02 – 00:03:47:35
Keith
This is Brian Gilbert. He is a former police captain. So remember, as this crime happens, think this guy’s a police captain and he’s still doing this stuff. He is a senior manager of special operations responsible for things like executive protection, meaning like if the CEO needs to go someplace where his safety could be threatened, I’m sure this guy would know about it.

00:03:47:40 – 00:03:53:39
Keith
He would do things like special events, security and safety at North American operations for eBay.

00:03:53:39 – 00:04:19:16
Keith
And now I don’t have a pic of Stephanie Stockwell. She’s an intelligence analyst, and then later on she’s manager of this global Intelligence Center, or GIC. It’s it’s like this group that develops intelligence for different reasons at eBay. The reasons aren’t entirely clear. They are for this crime, but it isn’t entirely clear for why day to day.

00:04:19:16 – 00:04:51:31
Keith
They just need it for normal business. But they do. They have an intelligence center. Usually with cybersecurity, that intelligence centers will deal with things like your possible threats of servers out there on the Internet or doing like threat hunting through your logs and things like that. So for the physical sense, I’m not as familiar with why you would need an intelligence center, but they did. Our last individual, our last main individual, we’re going to talk about here is Veronica Zea.

00:04:51:32 – 00:05:14:13
Keith
I have a picture of her here. This was in the New York Times article about this case. I guess she sat for a picture. She worked for eBay. But not directly, she was a contractor. So you can imagine, you know, Keith Jones Inc would hire her and then eBay would come and hire Keith Jones, Inc, and I would take some moola off the top and then pay her.

00:05:14:18 – 00:05:36:03
Keith
And then we all kind of make money in this scenario, and that’s that usually big companies do this. So they can hire and let go people really quickly without actually having to lay off people. There’s some other cooperating witnesses. I’m not going to name in here. They’re either they were involved or they were just in and around the meetings that happened with this criminal group.

00:05:36:08 – 00:05:57:51
Keith
So they were able to report things to the feds later on. And that’s how I’m able to bring you this information. Two eBay executives here. Not going to name them directly, but if you want their names, there’s news all over the place about this. The reason why I’m not naming them is because they weren’t directly indicted. So it felt weird to me to put the names directly in here.

00:05:57:51 – 00:06:25:34
Keith
But I can tell you what they did. Okay. One was a former CEO sold the highest command of eBay and the other one was as communications chief. So both are sea level employees. Both are officers of this company at the highest of levels. eBay themselves as a company is also a quote unquote, criminal as a company itself. And we’ll talk about that at the very end of this case.

00:06:25:39 – 00:06:51:48
Keith
So now the crime, what did they do? What did all these people do? They cyberstalked the shit out of this couple that ran a newsletter. Okay. So that was it, the crime cyberstalking. And then they throw in a little witness tampering later on because they tried to get themselves out of trouble. But this whole case is about cyberstalking and the victims, they they simply just made this newsletter and it was a husband wife team.

00:06:51:48 – 00:07:11:41
Keith
And I struggled whether or not I want to mention their names. And usually as a rule, I don’t. But in this case, near the end of the case, they came out and made public statements in their favor about what what types of things that they went through at the hands of eBay. And they did it with their faces and their names.

00:07:11:41 – 00:07:35:01
Keith
So I kind of figure that they’re okay with their names being mentioned. So I figured just maybe give them a few more visitors to their website. I’ll mention them here too, because they went through some hell, so their names were Ina and David Steiner. Now their newsletter is just wonderfully named. Because I saw this, I just chuckled. The newsletter is EcommerceBytes.

00:07:35:01 – 00:08:04:26
Keith
Bytes spelled with a y y as in yellow milk. Yes, just like eCrimeBytes. And I was like, these people, they really know how to name a newsletter, just like somebody knows a name podcast. All right. So that’s our victims here is this couple. They just own a newsletter that’s not affiliated with eBay or anything else. I’ll tell you a little bit about the newsletter in a second. But the technology here is a newsletter, but we’re gonna be talking about just some generic social media accounts like Twitter.

00:08:04:30 – 00:08:34:50
Keith
We’re going to be talking about old fashioned surveillance, not the kind that you do on a computer across the Internet, but literally in a van outside somebody’s house. Old fashioned surveillance, eBay, private individuals. Amazing, right. And the last technology in here, I just I couldn’t gloss over this weaponized porn and pizza, if you don’t know what that is and that doesn’t make sense to you, you’re going to have to stick around cause I’m gonna explain it later on.

00:08:34:54 – 00:08:37:39
Keith
I’ve even got pictures. I’ve even got pictures of this one.

00:08:37:39 – 00:08:59:28
Keith
So stick around. I’ll show you later on. So like I said, I picked this case because, damn, it reads like a fiction book from beginning to end. And immediately when I read that eBay had this special operations team and I was reading about how these people talk to each other and they acted like SEAL Team six, I was like, Holy shit, we’ve got to do an episode on this.

00:08:59:32 – 00:09:19:45
Keith
So buckle up. There’s a lot of stuff that happens in here and I try to cut down the material in here as much as possible and just give you the highlights. Do know I’m just giving you the tip of the iceberg here. These are just the highlights. There are a bunch of other things that happened in this case that I just didn’t want to drag this case out, giving you every detail.

00:09:19:45 – 00:09:40:49
Keith
So if you’re really interested in it, there’s a lot of stuff written on the Internet about this because this case was so big recently. Okay, so this newsletter, let me tell you, we’re starting with act number one of this episode, and I’m calling this one the newsletter. So a little bit about this newsletter. It was called EcommerceBytes, all one word.

00:09:40:54 – 00:10:09:11
Keith
And this catered mostly to sellers. So if you sold something on eBay or you sold something on Amazon, you usually want to read some kind of industry news to learn about what’s going on or maybe how to best sell your products. That’s what this newsletter would publish about. Some examples of titles of the newsletter going out was What is behind Amazon Prime shipping delays or Craigslist

00:10:09:16 – 00:10:42:40
Keith
Craigslist finally launches a mobile app worth the wait. So useful to just general population of doing e-commerce, right? Well, somewhere along the lines they also report on things like the CEO’s compensation and eBay. So the communications chief for eBay picks up on this because I guess this is a communication and this is his job. So he picks up on this, sees it, sends it to the CEO with a tag that says, we are going to crush this lady.

00:10:42:44 – 00:11:12:55
Keith
And I thought, holy shit, a huge corporate entity wants to crush some lady who has a simple electronic newsletter. And you might say, that’s just one bad apple, just communications chief. Don’t worry about them. No, but ten days later, the CEO saw coverage about himself in the Wall Street Journal. He sent a text to the Comms chief and he says f them.

00:11:13:00 – 00:11:42:45
Keith
The Journal is next on the list after this newsletter. So he knows he’s he’s involved with this. So these two statements I gave you alone, best case scenario for them, they knew about this, a worst case scenario for them…. They’re actually encouraging the cyberstalking that I’m going to present to you. So then in May of 2019, now this happens throughout the year of 2019, just in general, it starts around April ish and ends somewhere

00:11:42:45 – 00:12:11:28
Keith
in August September ish. So in May of 2019, there was another posting on this newsletter and the Comms chief included it. It doesn’t matter what the Post was, they didn’t like it. The Comms chief included the CEO and he says shockingly reasonable. And then the CEO replied, I could care less. I couldn’t care less about what she says.

00:12:11:33 – 00:12:26:10
Keith
Okay. So I’m trying to imagine this exchange in my mind. Right. So whatever it was that he found, he sent to the CEO, he was pissed enough to send it to the CEO. Was probably like, my God, you got to check this out. CEO was probably like we are a big company. I don’t give a shit about these newsletters.

00:12:26:15 – 00:12:54:21
Keith
Probably sat down with his coffee, pulled up the newsletter, read it, went fuck. And then went back to his comms chief and he just says, Take her down. Again. eBay large company talking about taking down a newsletter. So then I got to tell you about this tangent because they intertwine with all this newsletter stuff and eBay thinks they are the same thing and they’re not.

00:12:54:26 – 00:13:16:31
Keith
They’re some parody accounts. So if you’re familiar with the Internet at all, you know that these big companies a lot of times will have accounts that will parody them and pretend that they are them, but they’ll say funny things or use altered versions of their logos and stuff like that. Well, there were four accounts that parodied eBay. That eBay was following and they didn’t like. One of them was called FidoMaster.

00:13:16:36 – 00:13:41:12
Keith
That must’ve been the formal one, because the informal one must have been FidoMaster and the number one. Then there was another account just called Dan Davis and another account called UnsuckeBay. That was kind of my favorite UnsuckeBay was kind of funny. And so these are accounts that people made that somebody made out on places like Twitter, and they just were very critical of eBay.

00:13:41:17 – 00:14:05:48
Keith
And importantly, they amplified this news letter. So when eBay sees this, they think, these parody accounts and the newsletter, if they’re not the same people, they’re definitely working together. That’s that’s what eBay is thinking at this point. And I say eBay in the sense of the people working there at the time that committed the crimes. So you can imagine eBay has this negative press out there.

00:14:05:52 – 00:14:24:08
Keith
What would a sane person do, Right? Maybe hire a lawyer and go, hey, what are my options? What should I do? Fuck, no, these people do the exact opposite. This is where you need to buckle up. Okay, so I have a smidgen of some stuff that they did early on in the spring and then all shit breaks loose in the summer.

00:14:24:17 – 00:14:58:07
Keith
So let me tell you all about the stuff they have in the spring. First in the spring, we’re talking like April, May of 2019. According to confidential informants, Baugh summoned his team, which include Popp, StockWell, some analysts, Zea, to a conference room inside eBay. And he says this global intelligence center will be writing anonymous threatening letter to the victim, this newsletter lady to get her to stop publishing articles about eBay, specifically ones that are critical to eBay.

00:14:58:07 – 00:15:22:14
Keith
Right? In the letter, which is to be handwritten, I guess maybe it’s not traceable is to be sent from Austin, Texas, so it could not be connected to eBay, thankfully. Thankfully, it was not sent. But cooperating witnesses, they said this this was a plan. This is something this is something they wanted to do. Okay. I have to give you a little bit of geography here.

00:15:22:14 – 00:15:45:09
Keith
That’s going to be not only useful to this, but useful to the whole, whole episode. eBay is headquartered in California, so imagine all the way on the west coast of the United States. They’re on the ocean. Okay. This couple lives in Natick, Massachusetts, which is outside Boston, which is a completely other side of the United States on the ocean.

00:15:45:14 – 00:16:13:28
Keith
Okay. Pacific Ocean on one side, Atlantic Ocean on the other side. When they’re talking about faking this, a handwritten note as coming from Austin, Texas, what they’re saying is we’re going to send it. I’m pointing for video viewers here kind of the lower part of my video here. So Austin, Texas, is south of both of these places and kind of in the middle, I guess, to not draw suspicion to eBay because eBay is in California.

00:16:13:33 – 00:16:32:32
Keith
So at this point, I’m thinking these people know what they’re doing is not right because they’re trying to hide what it is that they’re sending these victims. June 2019 okay, This is where shit starts to go off the rails. June 2019.

00:16:32:32 – 00:16:37:55
Keith
Gilbert Remember Gilbert, the police captain in the uniform picture I showed you? He works at eBay

00:16:37:55 – 00:16:39:25
Keith
now.

00:16:39:29 – 00:16:59:48
Keith
Well, he flew out there all the way across the country that I showed you before and scribbled the word FidoMaster on the fence in front of the victim’s home. Okay, If you don’t know why that’s important, let me connect the dots of the stuff I just told you about. Gilbert, the police officer, former police officer, flew all the way across the country.

00:16:59:48 – 00:17:25:52
Keith
So that means that’s deliberate, he scribbled the word FidoMaster on the victim’s fence. FidoMaster is the name of the account, the parody account critical of eBay. So you can see eBay thinks that the victims and final master have something either the same person or they know each other. Now, as an investigator, you start asking yourself questions.

00:17:25:57 – 00:17:49:33
Keith
Gilbert flew to Boston. That’s a plane ticket that’s traceable. Well, there is a cooperating witness that purchased that ticket for him on their credit card. So it traced back to that cooperating witness. So I imagine why that witness is cooperating is because the government went, hey, you’re obviously involved here. And they’re like, hey, I didn’t know what I was doing.

00:17:49:33 – 00:18:11:09
Keith
He told me to buy them a plane ticket. It was all him. And I pointed back to Brian Gilbert. Now, you can imagine the Steiners are getting just harassed all the time. So they do what probably any sane person would do and put home surveillance out there. I imagine like any person, it was just standard stuff like ring cameras, right?

00:18:11:09 – 00:18:27:46
Keith
I mean, they’re easy to buy and install in 2024 now. And they had it out there and there was a there was a camera pointed at the fence where FidoMaster was written. And when they reviewed the tape, guess what was on there? I say tape. I say tape because I’m so old. Review the digital evidence. I don’t know what it was.

00:18:27:58 – 00:18:54:24
Keith
I imagine it was not tape. But when they reviewed the evidence, what they found was there was this black SUV that pulls up, gets out, and gets back in, and drives away. Later on, when the FBI does the investigation, they found that Gilbert rented a Ford black SUV similar to the one that shows up on that surveillance tape or at the time that FidoMaster was written on the fence.

00:18:54:29 – 00:19:17:09
Keith
If you stop there, that whole event, I think, would scare pretty much anybody. Right? If someone is pulling up to your house and writing FidoMaster on a fence and driving away, you don’t know who they are. It’s pretty terrifying. I mean to most people seeing an unknown number come across your cell phone is sometimes terrifying. So having this, I imagine, is absolutely terrifying.

00:19:17:09 – 00:19:41:15
Keith
And this is just I don’t mean to laugh. This is a tip of the iceberg. And I’m laughing at the criminals because there’s they’re just this is insanity. So that was June of 2019. So in July of 2019, Baugh came in and now he directed Stockwell and later Zea, the two analysts to monitor the newsletter posts that are going out that are critical of eBay.

00:19:41:20 – 00:20:03:31
Keith
He says hey whenever you see anything, send it to me over WhatsApp Day or night. Send it to me because I want to, you know, just catalog and know everything that’s going on about this newsletter, which again right there that’s obsessive and weird. And then Baugh says, hey, while you’re doing that, I want you to help me identify the authors of these parody accounts.

00:20:03:31 – 00:20:31:43
Keith
You know, the FidoMaster and the Dan account and the Unstuc eBay account. He said, this is our top priority. This is coming from the fucking CEO and the communications chief. Crazy, right? So this is this is coming from at least he’s saying this is coming from the top levels, according to the cooperating witnesses. He’s also saying to his analysts that he’s tasking out to do these tasks…

00:20:31:48 – 00:21:01:17
Keith
He says he thinks the parody account either made contacts, knows or is the Steiners in this case. So then he says, find evidence for me that the victims, the Steiners, the victims of the the newsletter and the parody accounts were collaborating together to publish this negative news about eBay. So the cooperating witness said, Yeah, we did. We he told us to do this and we tried and we tried.

00:21:01:17 – 00:21:25:08
Keith
We never really found this evidence, but he didn’t believe us. So it just kind of reminds me of the whole Moby-Dick Captain Ahab thing where it just Baugh was on a trail of these newsletter people, and he didn’t care that there wasn’t any evidence that his intelligence center was bringing back. He still believed they were all working together to be negative to eBay.

00:21:25:13 – 00:21:55:22
Keith
And again, at the end of the day, it’s just free speech, right? It’s not even even if they said the worst of the worst. eBay, it’s a newsletter. It’s a newsletter. Okay. So something important happened. On August 1st of 2019. The newsletter published some news that eBay either filed or was threatening some kind of lawsuit towards Amazon because they claim that Amazon was stealing their sellers.

00:21:55:27 – 00:22:12:39
Keith
These are all claims, and I don’t know exactly the details of the thing because it doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that litigation started or was going to start between eBay and Amazon because that factors into the conversation that happens next,

00:22:12:39 – 00:22:17:24
Keith
which is a text between Baugh and the communications chief. And I have it for you.

00:22:17:24 – 00:22:40:32
Keith
I’m going to put it on the screen now. So this is before talking to the comms chief and the Comms chief says the Steiner’s newsletter that’s out with a hot piece on the litigation, the litigation I just told you about with Amazon. He says if we’re ever going to take her down, now is the time. Baugh says I saw it.

00:22:40:37 – 00:23:05:36
Keith
Communications chief says hatred is a sin, I am very sinful. Wow, that that that’s scary. And the Baugh says, let me ask you this. Do any her entire site shut down? I’m not fucking around anymore with her anymore. Sorry. Some misspellings in here. And if you wonder why, I’m reading it to you. Video viewers. I have a bunch of audio viewers or listeners too that don’t see this, so I try to read it for them as well.

00:23:05:50 – 00:23:32:04
Keith
I apologize as do duplicate for you, but it is what it is. So the communications chief goes on and says, amen, I want her in all caps, DONE. Okay. This guy is a master of emphasizing specific words in caps. This communications chief, I imagine probably because he’s a communications chief, this is how he communicates. But when he wants to stress something, he caps stuff and it happens

00:23:32:09 – 00:23:49:45
Keith
the whole episode here. So he says, I want her done. And then Baugh says the CEO said burn her on the ground. Correct? And the comms chief says she is a biased troll who needs to get burned down in all caps.

00:23:49:45 – 00:23:57:11
Keith
Baugh says, Copy that. I have a plan B, I will put it in motion, will take two weeks, the communications chief says…

00:23:57:11 – 00:24:16:09
Keith
And now this is important, in my opinion, I’ll embrace managing any bad fallout. We need to, in all caps, stop her. Okay. So in my opinion, that’s where the communications chief, he knows what’s going on and he’s saying if any shit falls out from this, I’ll deal with it.

00:24:16:09 – 00:24:22:18
Keith
That’s just. Okay, hold that thought until the end, until you see who gets charged.

00:24:22:23 – 00:24:42:07
Keith
So at this point, Baugh’s like motherfucker I’m gonna get promoted. So he went back to his his crew and he was like, listen, he assembles them all in a conference room. He goes, We got this newsletter I, Keith Jones calls them victims, but he’s like, he’s probably like these newsletter fuckers. I have a campaign this is our campaign against them.

00:24:42:12 – 00:25:05:15
Keith
Our first part of the campaign, we’re going to send anonymous, threatening communications over things like Twitter and email and so forth. And then we’re going to order a bunch of unwanted, disturbing deliveries to their home. This is where I peaked up, and I was like, what kind of unwanted, disturbing deliveries could there be? I will tell you, I have pictures of some some of them I’m here.

00:25:05:16 – 00:25:26:50
Keith
Let me give you a taste. Funeral wreaths. Okay. If someone sent a funeral wreath to the house, that would be kind of disturbing wouldn’t be terrifying, but it would be weird. And books are surviving the loss of a spouse. Again, weird. Another part of Baugh’s campaign. He wants to do this thing he calls a white knight strategy or the government calls it this.

00:25:26:50 – 00:25:57:06
Keith
But this is their plan. The White Knight strategy is to terrorize the shit out of these victims. The Steiners, the the newsletter people terrorize the hell out of them, get them scared, and then walk in as eBay and go, hey, I heard you getting harassed by our sellers. We can help you investigate that and make it stop. Would you care to team up with us so that way, instead of them being on a adversarial basis, eBay thinks, they’ll be on a friendly basis.

00:25:57:11 – 00:26:25:14
Keith
That’s the plan. That’s the criminals’ plan. That’s not exactly how it works out in the end here. Stick around. And I will tell you. So the last part of the plan and this is where I literally fell out of my fucking chair, Baugh, Harville, Zea, Popp, are going to travel to Natick, Massachusetts, all the way across the country, thousands of miles to physically surveil the victims in their home.

00:26:25:19 – 00:26:52:30
Keith
And while they’re out in their community. Talk about an invasion of the fucking privacy. It’s just, I know I keep saying it, but this is it for me is mindblowing. I’ve never seen a case like this. This is I hope this is a one off. This is just. Wow. So the harassment continues because this he calls this whole thing a distraction campaign, quote unquote, because this is his words.

00:26:52:35 – 00:27:15:56
Keith
He suggests that scary masks, live insects and embarrassing items such as porn and strippers be sent to the victims. Now, let me stop there for a second. Scary masks. I’d be like, Well, that’s weird. Live insects. I’d be like, shit, don’t bring those inside. Definitely don’t want those. I’d be pretty scared of that one. Embarrassing items I went…

00:27:15:56 – 00:27:37:43
Keith
What kind of embarrassing items? Must be the pornography and strippers. And I thought, send them to me. Who the fuck cares if you send pornography and strippers to somebody’s house? Right? It’s 2024. I mean, you can’t even browse Instagram anymore without seeing somebody cooch or ass. So send pornography and strippers. That is not threatening. That is not threatening at all.

00:27:37:48 – 00:28:05:19
Keith
But they sent the pornography and strippers to these people’s neighbors with their their name on there. The victims names on there. That, that my friend that would suck. So that’s what they did in this case. So knowing that this is wrong in my opinion Baugh then stressed to all his crew you got to stay confidential, okay? You cannot get caught doing this.

00:28:05:24 – 00:28:28:28
Keith
And you can imagine that we get in a lot of trouble even though they think what they’re doing is okay because an executive told them it was okay in one of these meetings. Now, listen, Keith Jones myself, I love all types of people, including Samoan people. I don’t know why but Baugh has something against Samoan people, so I’m going to have to read a couple things a few times here and I have to apologize. Baugh says

00:28:28:28 – 00:28:54:37
Keith
in one of these meetings to his crew, he displayed a photograph of some people that he says is part of a Samoan gang. He says that if this distraction campaign, all this shit that I just described earlier that they’re doing to the victim or victims in this case, he says this doesn’t work, I’m sending this Samoan gang to the victim’s home and they’re not, quote unquote, good guys.

00:28:54:42 – 00:29:19:28
Keith
And whatever happened would be out of his control at this point. Holy shit. So again, I apologize, Samoans. I don’t know what he has against you, but you’re going to pop up a couple times in here. This is the first time. And second, what does he think he’s John Gotti or something? This is eBay, a commercial company surveilling a newsletter, which is a private company, an individual on the other end.

00:29:19:28 – 00:29:50:22
Keith
And now he’s talking about sending what he says are physically violent gangs to visit them. He also says when you do these deliveries with the porn and all this other stuff, he’s he’s talking to Zea or no, he’s talking to his group. But he says when you do these deliveries, make it not traceable to eBay. So when Zea went out and purchased these debit cards, she made these orders using things like anonymous, ah, email accounts.

00:29:50:22 – 00:30:12:12
Keith
So I imagine maybe like a protonmail account or maybe even just a Gmail account, a virtual private network. So that would change the IP address or that numerical address your computer uses on the internet… would change it to somewhere else. So you might look like you come from France instead of the US. And cell phones and computers specifically purchased for this harassment campaign.

00:30:12:12 – 00:30:37:52
Keith
So that way it wouldn’t be traced back to eBay. They’re going to effort to make it look like it wasn’t eBay, in my opinion, because they know it’s wrong. And he says Baugh says to his crew, I have support from executives and he shows them some of these text messages that I already shown you and talked about earlier with his crew to kind of say, hey, it’s not just me going rogue.

00:30:37:52 – 00:31:07:31
Keith
These these executives, they they really want this shit done too. So the threats. All right. So we’re in August 5th of 2019. There’s a week in here that some stuff happens. There is a Twitter account that’s made, and I’ll spell it for you. I’m not even going to try to pronounce it. It’s t u i underscore e l e i. Popp created this account and later on somebody says that this sounds Samoan.

00:31:07:36 – 00:31:25:51
Keith
Okay, again, sorry, Samoan people again, you’re being brought up. In this case, you did nothing. Absolutely nothing in this case. And they keep bringing you up. They made the Twitter account to sound Samoan, so that way they could blame this on their Samoan gang later on. That’s the only reason why I’m describing this to you, this Twitter account.

00:31:26:05 – 00:31:40:21
Keith
There’s actually a couple Twitter accounts. It has a picture of a skull on there. It’s supposed to be scary. Baugh selected the skull. So that way when the victims got harassing messages from them, they look at the profile. shit. I’m scared. There’s a skull.

00:31:40:21 – 00:31:54:37
Keith
So, Baugh, Popp, Gilbert, some supervisors that were witnesses later on, they all sent their plan to send a series of anonymous tweets and Twitter direct messages.

00:31:54:37 – 00:32:16:11
Keith
So stuff that you see publicly and also stuff that you send direct between two accounts. So they’re basically just bombarding them with anonymous messages that basically acted like they were sellers. Pissed off at the newsletter that the newsletter was talking about eBay, again, that’s their plan. I know it doesn’t make sense, but this is their plan. It’s, in my opinion, doesn’t make sense.

00:32:16:11 – 00:32:34:31
Keith
I mean, who would believe this shit? So they said that if they didn’t pay attention to these messages, meaning the victims didn’t pay attention, they would just keep ratcheting up and get more and more aggressive. And they did. And I’m not going to read them all to you because they start calling her the C word and all sorts of stuff.

00:32:34:36 – 00:32:53:57
Keith
But eventually they want to culminate in the publication of the victim’s home address. So that way, you know, it’s doxing so people can harass them and they would be scared and stop their newsletter, apparently. And then they wanted to implement this white knight strategy where they just said, hey, I heard you were getting harassed so much. We’re eBay, We can help you.

00:32:53:58 – 00:33:13:28
Keith
We can help you against these sellers. There our sellers. We will get them to stop. That was their strategy. They would hope this will persuade the victims to work with them to figure out who the parody accounts were if they weren’t the victims themselves, because they don’t know at this point. They think they’re either working together or they’re the same people.

00:33:13:28 – 00:33:27:09
Keith
But they think if they can get the victims on their side by being the white knights, they can get help in figuring out who the the parody accounts are. So let me tell you how… Just…

00:33:27:09 – 00:33:34:14
Keith
Well, let me just read it. It’s this is an email from the comms chief to one of the other people in this case.

00:33:34:19 – 00:34:09:41
Keith
And it tells you just kind of what was going through his mind at the time. So the Comms chief says, I’m utterly vexed by this. This Twitter account dominates our social narrative with his caps constant obsession with trolling us. It’s more than annoying. It’s very damaging. There are very there are a few people, this guy in the newsletter, people infatuated with eBay who have seemingly dedicated their lives to erroneously trashing us as a way to build their own brand or even build a business is genuinely unfair and causes tremendous damage because we look bad fighting back in public and standing up for ourselves.

00:34:09:46 – 00:34:24:15
Keith
If we could engage, I’d welcome the fight. And we have a lot of facts and truth to win with. But instead we take shots broadside and sit on our powder. The issue gives me ulcers, harms employee morale and trickles into everything about our brand.

00:34:24:15 – 00:34:33:16
Keith
I genuinely believe that people are acting out of malice and in all caps. Anything we can do to solve it should be explored somewhere.

00:34:33:16 – 00:35:01:09
Keith
At some point, someone chose to let this slide. It has grown to a point that is absolutely unaccepted. Evil is the blind eye towards graffiti that turns into mayhem syndrome. And I’m sick about it. Whatever period it period takes, period that whatever it takes that is quoted several times by the government later on that this guy was in on it too, cause trouble for the victims.

00:35:01:09 – 00:35:23:48
Keith
Okay, so August 2019, Baugh recruited Harville and Zea to physically surveil their victims in Natick, Massachusetts, all the way across the country. It’s just outside Boston, so it’s a flight. Okay, so they need a reason for this because they’re trying to be confidential and not get caught.

00:35:23:48 – 00:35:45:02
Keith
So it wasn’t just this crew that was in on the the meetings. There were some other cooperating witnesses that were, you know, in on the meetings or at least knew about them. And they said that this trip was to surveil the couple so that they could try to find some kind of evidence that the parody account was linked to these.

00:35:45:07 – 00:36:17:20
Keith
The couple publishing negative content about eBay, which, again, even in the best case scenario so what I mean, so what? All right. So they try to do this all off the radar so they don’t tell their coworkers or friends. There’s even a point in there where they say, hey, don’t tell your wife why it is that you’re going. So they want it to be for some aspects off the grid for this trip.

00:36:17:20 – 00:36:25:12
Keith
So they use their own cell phones and WhatsApp and non corporate communications to talk to each other.

00:36:25:12 – 00:36:41:20
Keith
But we have a text message here of them talking about this. So you can see Jim’s talking to the comms chief or he’s talking to Harville about something that the comms chief said and he said, you know, he starts off with, here’s the two targets and it’s the victims.

00:36:41:25 – 00:37:17:09
Keith
He says, one known, one unknown, Never search for them on your personal work, phone or computer. And Harville goes copy. And then Baugh says they will find you first. And he says, copy. And then he followed the thread that we just talked about with the communications chief to Harville. I think to kind of show him that the communications chief is, he is high up there in the in the structure of eBay and he’s showing that there is support for this special operations that they’re taking over towards Boston, Massachusetts.

00:37:17:13 – 00:37:17:43
Keith
And then

00:37:17:43 – 00:37:51:07
Keith
Baugh continues on the Harville. He says I won’t send the boss text, but I’ve been ordered to find and destroy. And then Harville replies back, Copy, totally black. I’m deleting this now, which totally black means I’m being covert, I think. And then he says, I’m deleting this now, which is important because that’s destruction of evidence, which also leads into one of the charges later on, which is what I think they kind of try to encompass most of it under witness tampering because that relates to records in a federal investigation.

00:37:51:07 – 00:37:56:13
Keith
It’s kind of a weird legal thing is how I understand it.

00:37:56:13 – 00:38:20:02
Keith
So they’re preparing for this trip. The cooperating witnesses said, yeah, at the office, they they bought a GPS device. These fuckers, they did. And they went out and they found a car in the parking lot that looked like the Steiners’ car. And they practiced putting this GPS device on that car and taking it off for the trip.

00:38:20:07 – 00:38:47:18
Keith
They practiced at some random strangers car. I just I’m trying to imagine. It’s like, just imagine going out to your work parking lot and finding a random car and then pretending or actually doing it. They’re putting the GPS thing on there and going, hey, we’re testing it, taking it off, putting it back, and in preparation for a trip to surveil somebody across the country who’s a private citizen as a private citizen.

00:38:47:23 – 00:39:05:08
Keith
So now they’re planning to go out there and surveil them. So somebody along the line, I think it was Baugh, Harville. No, it was Gilbert. Gilbert told the rest of the group. He said, Ah, fuckers, we’re we’re sending all these harassing deliveries. So they’re probably on high alert right now and you go out there and surveil them.

00:39:05:08 – 00:39:20:23
Keith
They’re going to be looking around going, why are we getting all these crazy deliveries and they’re going to see you, and we don’t want them to see you because you’re I’m a police officer. I’m telling you, you’re supposed to be surveillance. You’re supposed to be silent. You’re supposed to be invisible. So someone goes, well, just stop the deliveries.

00:39:20:28 – 00:39:49:23
Keith
And everybody was like, Cool, cool. You stop the deliveries. Keep that in mind here because this is going to show back up in a second. So they’re now after they stop the deliveries, they go, we’re going to create some alibis because if we get caught, we need a reason why we’re out there. So some of the reasons why they say they were out there is they the analysts were technical people like me, and they said, hey, we’ve got this software development conference we found going on in Boston at the exact same time.

00:39:49:28 – 00:40:13:37
Keith
And they basically put some emails together and made it look like Harville and Zea were going to go out there and register and attend this software development conference. So if they were caught they can go I had a real reason to be there. So they created a document also, they call it the Persons of Interest document. That’s what the criminals call it.

00:40:13:42 – 00:40:44:19
Keith
I call it a dossier. It’s just it’s weird, okay? It’s so weird. So it’s just it’s basically this false dossier of the victims making it look like the victims are harassing executives in eBay. So that way, if Baugh and his crew get caught surveilling the victims, they would have this document and go, we’re only surveilling them because they threaten the CEO physically or some other executive physically.

00:40:44:19 – 00:41:06:43
Keith
This is our job. This is what we do for eBay. So they had this fake document that made it look like the victims disparaged and were threatening the executives. Now, again, this is not just a tangent point. This document’s going to come back up later a couple of times. So keep this in mind, too. This in their minds, this is their alibi.

00:41:06:43 – 00:41:31:57
Keith
So now they have their alibi. Now they have everything set and they sat down and this is when the delivery started. So August 10th. My God. August 10th of 2019, the victim received an email that says you’re getting a preserved fetal pig that had been order online and has been shipped to your house. May not be scary, but my God, that would be so disgusting.

00:41:31:57 – 00:41:50:47
Keith
So apparently it looked like it looked like it was maybe purchased but never actually delivered. It looked like they tried they tried to have a preserved fetal pain show up there. So that didn’t work. So then there was another thing 4PM. There was an Amazon package shows up at the victim’s house. And I know I’m smiling and laughing.

00:41:50:47 – 00:42:13:52
Keith
I’m doing this because these criminals are fucking assholes for doing this. I’m not laughing at the victims at any means. This totally sucks for the victims, but the criminals are going to have what’s coming to them later on. Trust me. So to this Amazon package shows up in the afternoon, opens it up a Halloween mask of a bloody pig face.

00:42:13:53 – 00:42:30:51
Keith
And I have a picture of this I’m going to put on your screen now. This is the pig mask that I’ve seen in some horror movies. I’ve seen this before. This is like the one where a human wears it and you’re like, shit, that guy is out to kill me. If you see someone wearing this, if someone was wearing this mask, this is not Halloween.

00:42:30:56 – 00:42:42:35
Keith
This is not, you know, funny. Play a prank on somebody. This is whoever is wearing this is a serial murderer. I’m telling you that much. This is for the audio people. They can’t see this mask. It is a scary mask.

00:42:42:35 – 00:42:54:20
Keith
Another package shows up. This is a book from Amazon Grief Diaries, Surviving the loss of a spouse. Not really scary but weird.

00:42:54:25 – 00:42:55:05
Keith
And that’s it.

00:42:55:05 – 00:43:17:42
Keith
We’re at the end of act one because we’re just getting to the surveillance at this point. This is where they physically sit out in front of the newsletter couple’s home, and this is just where it goes bonkers. So I’m going to have to do a pause here because I just gave you all the background and all the great stuff to get to the pinnacle of this case, which is surveillance that day.

00:43:17:47 – 00:43:44:03
Keith
And I will I will leave you with one preview of what happens on Surveillance Day, which is August 15th of 2019. There is a shipment that happens at two other victims neighbors. Okay, Imagine you’re a neighbor. You probably don’t know what’s happening to your neighbor. They’re being harassed. A shipment comes, you go outside to pick it up like Tony Soprano in your in your bathrobe.

00:43:44:03 – 00:44:07:25
Keith
Walk inside, you open it up and it’s boom. What I put on your screen right now is barely legal, full length DVD inside. It is definitely porn. And I stopped right here for a second. I was like, fuck in 2019 and they have a DVD of porn still. Who the hell watches porn DVD in 2019. My God.

00:44:07:25 – 00:44:33:28
Keith
That person right there needs help. But I don’t want to go down too much of that tangent, but this shows up at the neighbor’s house. Probably, probably to upset the neighbors enough so the neighbors would go over, go uh Bob your barely legal. I guess his name is David. David your barely legal porn is here And then they would be embarrassed and then hopefully David would say hey we’re being harassed.

00:44:33:29 – 00:44:55:53
Keith
This is definitely not me. But it would be a very awkward situation if you weren’t on a real good relationship with your neighbor, I imagine. And then also on Surveillance Day, a florist delivered a sympathy wreath to the victim’s home. I don’t have a picture of that. I’m sorry. They had another death themed delivery. So the Natick Police, the I guess are a smaller town there, too.

00:44:55:53 – 00:45:19:53
Keith
And the eBay people, they make fun of them being a small town, but the small town actually came back and fucked them at the end, which is awesome. But the Natick Police Department officer started to do an investigation and found that the florist stated the person who ordered the wreath also tried to unsuccessfully cancel that order. Remember earlier when I said they’re going to surveil and somebody went or Gilbert went, hey um better stop

00:45:19:53 – 00:45:41:32
Keith
these deliveries is because we’re going to surveil them. Well they try to cancel it and it didn’t work and it actually went through and was delivered. So with that, now we’re done with act One, which was the newsletter, because tomorrow we’re going to talk about act two, which is all about the surveillance day. And there is a ton of shit that happens here and all of it, all of it.

00:45:41:32 – 00:45:58:39
Keith
You’re going to be just holding your head going, Is this real? And it is. It’s all real. It’s all in the court documents and I’ll bring it to you. So if there’s anything you like in this, please like thumbs up, follow, subscribe, and please share this with any of your friends that you think might like a true crime podcast.

00:45:58:39 – 00:46:18:13
Keith
where I’m obviously not always serious. Most of the things I say here ah the court, details are serious, but everything else, I kind of joke about it. So if you like us, like, thumbs up, follow, subscribe. I really appreciate that that gets me in front of other people. Just the simple likes on YouTube. It’s a big deal to me.

00:46:18:13 – 00:46:28:27
Keith
I really appreciate it. And with that I hope you come back tomorrow. I’m going to bring you back to Surveillance Day in this crazy case of being cyber stalked by eBay. Thanks.

DrKeithJones.com

Cyberstalked By eBay – Act 1: The Newsletter

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