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.

  • Poggervania@kbin.social
    99·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • Cosmicomical@kbin.social
    37·
    11 months ago

    “We are taking every step possible to work with the police so they can identify them.”

    Yeah just make sure it’s the actual police.

    • ricecake
      26·
      11 months ago

      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.

  • ArugulaZ@kbin.social
    271·
    11 months ago

    She could tell it was Verizon’s fault because the stalker kept calling her, asking, 'Can you hear me now?"

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.eeEnglish
    26·
    11 months ago

    …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!

    • Catsrules@lemmy.ml
      2·
      11 months ago

      To be fair if Poppy got killed they would have lost a customer and the income from that customer. How would they recover from that?

  • JCreazy@midwest.socialEnglish
    24·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • Shelbyeileen@lemmy.world
    8·
    11 months ago

    I knew instantly that she, like myself, was an adult content creator, because this keeps happening to women online; but especially to SWers.

    I had a guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer and he stalked down and threatened my grandma. I had to get the police involved.

    Meg Turney, her stalker learned she was in a relationship, and he broke into their home with a gun ready to kill them.

    There was a story of a singer in Japan whose stalker found her location through the reflection in her eye, went to her house, and sexually assaulted her!

    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.