A former Twitter employee has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison after being found guilty of spying for Saudi Arabia. Convict Ahmad Abouammo unlawfully obtained private user information from Twitter’s servers and shared it with Saudi government officials, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a press release. Abouammo worked for the social network between 2013 and 2015, serving as the Media Partnerships Manager for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
The former Twitter employee received bribes in exchange for information
According to the DOJ, Abouammo started receiving bribes from a Saudi official in exchange for user information in December 2014. He met the foreign official in London and received a luxury Hublot watch worth $42,000 as a bribe. He then repeatedly accessed Twitter servers to obtain information about users, particularly those critical of the Saudi Royal Family. Abouammo was in regular touch with the Saudi official all this while.
In February 2015, Abouammo traveled to Lebanon and opened a bank account there in his father’s name. He received two $100,000 transfers from the same foreign official in this account. The second transfer came after he left Twitter in May 2015. He laundered the money by sending it into the US in small wire transfers with false descriptions. Despite leaving Twitter, Abouammo asked the Saudi official if they wanted any additional information from the social network.
FBI agents first interrogated Abouammo in October 2018. He lied to the investigators and falsified an invoice. He was eventually arrested in November 2019. Senior US District Judge Edward M. Chen for the Northern District of California found him guilty of multiple counts of “Fraud, Conspiracy, Obstruction, and Foreign Agent Charges for Bribe Scheme to Access, Monitor, and Convey User Information” following a two-week trial in August this year.
Abouammo faced decades in prison and fines of up to $250,000 for each count of guilty. The court eventually sentenced him to three and a half years in prison Wednesday. According to a Reuters report, the attorneys said Abouammo’s actions paled in comparison to those of Ali Alzabarah. The latter also once worked for Twitter and spied for Saudi Arabia, sharing information about thousands of Twitter users. Alzabarah has reportedly fled to Saudi Arabia to evade the DOJ.
Since the Saudi government severely penalizes citizens for posting anti-government content online, Abouammo and Alzabarah’s actions may have exposed many people to persecution. In April this year, a 34-year-old mother was sentenced to 34 years in prison for tweets against the government. Similar tweets landed a 72-year-old dual US-Saudi citizen 16 years in prison in October.
2022-12-15 15:07:06