May 12, 2021

Michael Kail, a former vice president of IT operations at Netflix, was convicted by a federal jury of wire fraud, mail fraud and money laundering.

Kail used his position at Netflix to approve contracts with companies who offered him bribes and kickbacks.

The former Netflix executive’s plans forced colleagues to use a variety of products, including those that Netflix employees objected to because they preferred another product that the company was already paying for.

Kail was vice president of IT operations at Netflix from November 1, 2011, until August 2014, when he joined Yahoo.

In 2018, he was charged with 19 counts of wire fraud, three counts of mail fraud and seven counts of money laundering.

He was later found guilty of 28 of the 29 counts, and the jury also found that Kail’s Los Gatos home was bought with laundered money and can therefore be forfeited to the government.

To facilitate bribes, Kail founded a limited liability company called Unix Mercenary LLC, which was founded on February 7, 2012. Unix Mercenary had no employees or business address, and Kail was the only signatory to its bank accounts.

Kail also had bribery agreements with providers such as Platfora, Sumo Logic, Netskope, Maginatics, ElasticBox and Numerify.

Kail left Netflix to become chief information officer of Yahoo, where he stayed less than a year before founding a venture capital startup called Cybric, which was later renamed ZeroNorth.

After Kail’s departure, Netflix decided not to hire another VP of IT Operations and many of his former responsibilities were handed over to another employee.

For more information, read the original story in Arstechnica.