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.
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.
Once police got involved, the former eBay employees tried to cover their tracks. Baugh and his team falsified records and deleted evidence to throw the cops “off the trail,” the DOJ said. Baugh was also caught making false statements to police and internal investigators and subsequently became the first eBay employee involved who was imprisoned in 2022 for “terrorizing innocent people,” Levy said.
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