An ex-Twitter employee was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison for participating in a scheme where he accessed, monitored, and conveyed sensitive information that could be used to identify and locate Twitter users of interest to the Saudi Royal Family and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).
According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Ahmad Abouammo, a Seattle resident, was "convicted of acting as a foreign agent without notice to the Attorney General, conspiracy, wire fraud, international money laundering and falsification of records" after an August investigation earlier this year.
Court documents show that Abouammo started receiving bribes from the KSA as early as 2014, when the defendant was employed at Twitter as a Media Partnerships Manager for the Middle East and North Africa.
In exchange for the bribes, Abouammo would access Twitter user accounts and convey information on critics of the KSA to their government officials, all while lying to the FBI and falsifying documents about the transactions in question.
Abouammo met with a KSA government official in London in 2014, where he received a luxury Hublot watch valued at $42,000. In 2015, he traveled to Lebanon where a bank account was opened in his name and received two payments of $100,000 each.
Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the DOJ's National Security Division discussed the case:
"Mr. Abouammo violated the trust placed on him to protect the privacy of individuals by giving their personal information to a foreign power for profit. His conduct was made all the more egregious by the fact that the information was intended to target political dissidents speaking out against that foreign power. We are committed to holding accountable those who act unlawfully as unregistered foreign agents and advance hidden influence campaigns on behalf of foreign regimes."
For more information, see the announcement from the DOJ, Former Twitter Employee Sentenced to 42 Months in Federal Prison for Acting as a Foreign Agent.
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