A stalker haphazardly posing as a cop demanded sensitive data from Verizon. Verizon complied, and the stalker drove to an address armed with a knife. 404 Media spoke to the victim.
“Verizon royally fucked up,” Poppy told me in a phone call. “There’s no way around it.” Verizon, she added, was “100% at fault.”
Verizon handed Poppy’s personal data, including the address on file and phone logs, to a stalker who later directly threatened her and drove to an address armed with a knife. Police then arrested the suspect, Robert Michael Glauner, who is charged with fraud and stalking offenses, but not before he harassed Poppy, her family, friends, workplace, and daughter’s therapist, Poppy added. 404 Media has changed Poppy’s name to protect her identity.
Glauner’s alleged scheme was not sophisticated in the slightest: he used a ProtonMail account, not a government email, to make the request, and used the name of a police officer that didn’t actually work for the police department he impersonated, according to court records. Despite those red flags, Verizon still provided the sensitive data to Glauner.
Remarkably, in a text message to Poppy sent during the fallout of the data transfer, a Verizon representative told Poppy that the corporation was a victim too. “Whoever this is also victimized us,” the Verizon representative wrote, according to a copy of the message Poppy shared with 404 Media. “We are taking every step possible to work with the police so they can identify them.”
In the interview with 404 Media, Poppy pointed out that Verizon is a multi-billion dollar company and yet still made this mistake. “They need to get their shit together,” she said.
Bullshit, Verizon isn’t a victim at all - they fucked up, they should own up to their mistake instead of trying to go “me too!” to a situation where a stalker harassed their customer and their family after giving said stalker the customer’s personal information.
Yup. I used to work for a much smaller tech company, and we had a perfectly reasonable process for dealing with cour orders and search warrants that involved crazy things like "get it in hard copy", and "verify the information contained in the order".
For some things, we would even just ask the officer to physically come in and that was weirdly never a problem.
...a Verizon representative told Poppy that the corporation was a victim too.
Fuck off. You're all a bunch of idiots who didn't do an extremely quick search online to find an officer of that name in that area. Or at the very least call the police in that area to confirm said person isn't a fraudster! Large corporations need to stop gaslighting us into thinking that when they fuck up that they're victims!
I don't know how other people see it but the way I see it is if a company makes as much money as Verizon does then there is no excuse for this to happen. They have more than enough money to prevent this from happening tenfold but instead of investing money into the company CEOs get paid. With that being said, I believe that if there are any issues in a company, the CEO should be a 100% responsible. If they are going to get paid more money than anyone else than they should be doing more work than anyone else and if bad things are happening below them. That means they're not doing their due diligence.
Anytime anyone says it's so easy to make money with digital sex work, I tell them stories like this. We have to put our photos out there to advertise, we have to show interest in our supporters, we need to traverse so carefully... our lives might be on the line.