eBay-owned payments company says Google stole its executives and its trade secrets around mobile payments

Sarah Thomas, Director, Women in Comms

May 27, 2011

1 Min Read
PayPal Sues Google for Mobile Wallet

Fresh off its grand Mobile Wallet unveiling, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is being slapped with a lawsuit from PayPal , which claims the software giant recruited away PayPal executive Osama Bedier, bringing trade secrets with him. (See Google Taps Sprint for Tap-to-Pay.)

According to the lawsuit, filed by PayPal and parent company eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY), Bedier was negotiating a deal for PayPal to handle sales of apps in Google's Android Market, but was interviewing for a job at Google at the same time.

PayPal claims it has been building a mobile payments ecosystem up for the past 10 years, and that Bedier held on to the intel from the company's interworkings when he left in January. What's more condemning are PayPal's allegations that Bedier transferred up-to-date versions of documents outlining the company's mobile payment and point-of-sale strategies to his personal computer just days before leaving the company. eBay has asked for the information back, but Bedier has repeatedly refused, the lawsuit says. "In the course of his work at Google, Bedier and Google have misappropriated PayPal trade secrets by disclosing them within Google and to major retailers," the lawsuit reads. Stephanie Tilenius, Google's VP of eCommerce, is also a former PayPal executive who eBay says helped recruit Bedier away to build Google's Near-Field Communications (NFC) platform.

Bedier, Tilenius and Google are all named as defendants in the lawsuit.

— Sarah Reedy, Senior Reporter, Light Reading Mobile

About the Author(s)

Sarah Thomas

Director, Women in Comms

Sarah Thomas's love affair with communications began in 2003 when she bought her first cellphone, a pink RAZR, which she duly "bedazzled" with the help of superglue and her dad.

She joined the editorial staff at Light Reading in 2010 and has been covering mobile technologies ever since. Sarah got her start covering telecom in 2007 at Telephony, later Connected Planet, may it rest in peace. Her non-telecom work experience includes a brief foray into public relations at Fleishman-Hillard (her cussin' upset the clients) and a hodge-podge of internships, including spells at Ingram's (Kansas City's business magazine), American Spa magazine (where she was Chief Hot-Tub Correspondent), and the tweens' quiz bible, QuizFest, in NYC.

As Editorial Operations Director, a role she took on in January 2015, Sarah is responsible for the day-to-day management of the non-news content elements on Light Reading.

Sarah received her Bachelor's in Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She lives in Chicago with her 3DTV, her iPad and a drawer full of smartphone cords.

Away from the world of telecom journalism, Sarah likes to dabble in monster truck racing, becoming part of Team Bigfoot in 2009.

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