Turns out that all the money in the world can’t buy you thick skin.
eBay has agreed to pay $3 million to settle a criminal probe into a Massachusetts couple’s nightmarish experience at the hands of some of its top brass, who terrorized them—sending them live spiders, cockroaches, fly larvae, and a bloody pig mask—in the summer of 2019 over their e-commerce newsletter.
The U.S. Department of Justice charged eBay with stalking, witness tampering and obstruction of justice more than three years after the seven employees behind the harassment campaign were prosecuted in the vindictive and disturbing scheme to intimidate David and Ina Steiner. (Four of the employees were sentenced to prison time over the plot. Two were handed a year of home confinement, while the seventh member of the ring has yet to be sentenced.)
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“eBay engaged in absolutely horrific, criminal conduct,” acting U.S. Attorney Joshua S. Levy said in a statement. “The company’s employees and contractors involved in this campaign put the victims through pure hell, in a petrifying campaign aimed at silencing their reporting and protecting the eBay brand.”
The Steiners launched their blog and newsletter, eCommerceBytes.com, in 1999, and had accumulated a strong readership by 2021, when Boston magazine reported that their site drew in around 600,000 hits a month. The couple said in a post Thursday that the company’s crusade against them “had a damaging and permanent impact on us—emotionally, psychologically, physically, reputationally, and financially.”
Expressing frustrations that more executives hadn’t been punished, the couple said they’d been targeted “because we reported facts that top executives didn’t like publicly laid bare.”
Though the Steiners had tempers in eBay’s C-suite close to boiling for years, the harassment only began in earnest in 2019, after Ina Steiner’s diligent coverage of the company drew the ire of then-CEO Devin Wenig, who fumed about the site to colleagues.
“Take her down,” he texted Steve Wymer, then the chief communications officer, in May 2019, according to court records.
Other eBay executives swapped vitriolic texts about the Steiners, according to a trove of messages included in the 73-page deferred prosecution agreement shared by the Justice Department on Thursday. One called Ina Steiner “a biased troll who needs to be BURNED DOWN,” adding, “Hatred is a sin. I am very sinful.” Another referred to David Steiner as an “unsuck idiot.”
In the summer of 2019, according to court records, Steve Wymer, eBay’s chief communications officer, reached out to Jim Baugh, who was working as eBay’s senior security director at the time, to oversee the beginning of the intimidation squeeze.
“If I can neutralize Ina’s website in two weeks or less does that work for you?” Baugh asked.
“I want to see ashes,” Wymer wrote back. “As long as it takes. Whatever it takes.”
Baugh and the six other eBay employees in the security department “worked together to harass and intimidate the Steiners, and to place them under surveillance with the intent to harass and intimidate them, through repeated and hostile Twitter messages, deliveries of unwanted—and in some instances disturbing—items to the Steiners’ home, and travel to Massachusetts to conduct physical surveillance,” according to the deferred prosecution agreement.
In addition to the insects and pig’s mask, the trolling campaign included sending the couple a funeral wreath and a book on surviving the loss of a spouse, according to court records. A day after the pig’s mask showed up on the Steiners’ doorstep, one of the employees messaged Ina on Twitter: “DO I HAVE UR ATTENTION NOW????”
Pizza deliveries and repairmen were incessantly ordered to the couple’s home as Ina continued to be bombarded by threatening DMs calling her and her husband “pussies.” The employees also attempted to put a GPS tracking device on the couple’s car at one point, but were hampered by the locked garage. All the while, the security team texted with one another as though they were characters in a spy flick, speaking of surveillance vehicles getting “burned,” going “black,” and being ordered to “find and destroy” the Steiners.
As part of the deferred prosecution agreement, eBay has accepted responsibility for the intimidation tactics of its employees. The company will also be required to retain a corporate compliance monitor for three years and make “extensive enhancements” to its compliance program, according to the Justice Department.
The Steiners have separately filed a civil lawsuit against eBay and the former employees, including Wenig, who stepped down as CEO in 2019 and was not criminally charged, which is set to go to trial in March 2025.
