Egill R. Erlendsson lives in Iceland and worked at Automattic some years ago. Specifically he worked in the WordAds program. (You already know where this is going…)
Egill R. Erlendsson Code Wrangler & Wizard of Ads at Automattic & WordPress.com
https://egill.blog/
One day it was posted internally that he had left the company and no-one was to talk to him. I forget the exact wording, but in the history of Automattic (to 2020) this was only one of two sudden departures. (The other was for conduct at a Grand Meetup but I have no details).
A few days later, Matt posted to the main Updates p2. Egill R. Erlendsson had, with the help of a couple of friends, defrauded Automattic – or rather the advertisers – to the tune of USD 800,000. No typo, that’s $800k. This was discovered by a colleague who noticed something odd and went hunting. Matt said something about action being taken yadda yadda.
Just before the TLD .blog was launched Automattic employees were given first refusal on ‘theirname’.blog – there were conditions though. One was that the .blog domain had to be used and updated regularly. The other was that the .blog would not actually be yours, it would remain the property of Automattic.
https://egill.blog/ continues to exist and as far as I am aware there has been no action of any sort taken against him.
The fox ran the henhouse and got away scot-free.
