eBay’s harassment campaign against the couple, David and Ina Steiner, stretched for 18 days in August 2019 and was led by the company’s former senior director of safety and security, Jim Baugh. It started when then-CEO Devin Wenig and then-chief communications officer Steven Wymer decided to “take down” the Steiners after growing frustrated with their coverage of eBay in a newsletter called EcommerceBytes.
If the defendant agreed to the maximum penalty, that tells you they’re being let off easy.
Criminal acts by companies should include fines large enough to make the shareholders mad, or else there was no real punishment.
Criminal acts by companies should include fines large enough to make the shareholders mad, or else there was no real punishment.
All of their profits earned for each day when the harassment occurred sounds like a reasonably large fine. I don’t know how much profit eBay made in the 18 days their employees harassed these people, but I bet it was a lot more than $3 million.
eBay’s harassment campaign against the couple, David and Ina Steiner, stretched for 18 days in August 2019 and was led by the company’s former senior director of safety and security, Jim Baugh. It started when then-CEO Devin Wenig and then-chief communications officer Steven Wymer decided to “take down” the Steiners after growing frustrated with their coverage of eBay in a newsletter called EcommerceBytes.
Executing the “take down,” Baugh and six co-conspirators “put the victims through pure hell,” acting US attorney Joshua S. Levy wrote in the DOJ’s press release.
The former eBay employees turned the Steiners’ world “upside-down through a never-ending nightmare of menacing and criminal acts,” Levy said. That included “sending anonymous and disturbing deliveries,” such as “a book on surviving the death of a spouse, a bloody pig mask, a fetal pig and a funeral wreath and live insects,” the DOJ said. The intimidation also included publishing a series of “Craigslist posts inviting the public for sexual encounters at the victims’ home.”
But the intimidation did not stop there. After sending tweets and DMs threatening to visit the couple’s home, former eBay employees escalated the criminal activity by traveling to Massachusetts and installing a GPS tracker on the Steiners’ car. Spotting their stalkers, the Steiners called local police, who coordinated with the FBI to investigate what Levy called an “unprecedented stalking campaign” fueled by eBay’s toxic corporate culture.
Damn. And there I was shopping at eBay because I imagined it was a little better than Amazon. What is wrong with these people? How can a person end up doing that just for the sake of the company they work for? Is it just about money? I guess with the CEO’s involvement it’s probably the usual combination of greed, arrogance and lust for power. But despite instigating the “takedown”, it seems the former CEO isn’t among those being punished.
Something I see working in infosec is that there are some people who get into it for the power, thinking they’re basically cops. This being run by their Director of Safety and Security reeks of that kind of cop-mindset.
I remember hearing this story a long time ago, It’s still so shocking that this happened.
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eBay has agreed to pay $3 million—the maximum criminal penalty possible—after employees harassed, intimidated, and stalked a Massachusetts couple in retaliation for their critical reporting of the online marketplace in 2019.
“Today’s settlement holds eBay criminally and financially responsible for emotionally, psychologically, and physically terrorizing the publishers of an online newsletter out of fear that bad publicity would adversely impact their Fortune 500 company," Jodi Cohen, the special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Boston Division, said in a Justice Department press release Thursday.
eBay’s harassment campaign against the couple, David and Ina Steiner, stretched for 18 days in August 2019 and was led by the company’s former senior director of safety and security, Jim Baugh.
It started when then-CEO Devin Wenig and then-chief communications officer Steven Wymer decided to “take down” the Steiners after growing frustrated with their coverage of eBay in a newsletter called EcommerceBytes.
After sending tweets and DMs threatening to visit the couple’s home, former eBay employees escalated the criminal activity by traveling to Massachusetts and installing a GPS tracker on the Steiners’ car.
Cohen acknowledged that the settlement “cannot erase the significant distress this couple suffered” but said that the DOJ hopes slapping eBay with the maximum fine "will deter others from engaging in similar conduct.”
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Someone must have signed off on this and thst person should have gotten jail time IMHO.
