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eBay agrees to $3 million fine for trying to destroy lives of Natick couple; couple's civil suit continues
By adamg on Thu, 01/11/2024 - 1:42pm
Among the items company goons sent couple: Bloody-pig mask and grief book.
California-based online swapping-post concern eBay has agreed to a $3 million fine for the terror campaign its executives and employees waged against a Natick couple who ran an online news site that published items the company didn't like, the US Attorney's office in Boston reports.
The fine is for the criminal charges the company faced in a new filing in US District Court in Boston today: Two counts of stalking through interstate travel, two counts of stalking through electronic communications services, one count of witness tampering and one count of obstruction of justice.
Separately, Ina and David Steiner have their own civil suit against the concern, which in 2019 launched a campaign that included sending them live cockroaches and spiders, a fetal pig, pizzas and a bloody-pig-face mask, sending pornographic magazines in David Steiner's name, posting bogus Craigslist ads for sexual events at their home and attempting to torment the couple through Twitter postings and direct messages. The items were purchased through Amazon and other online purveyors of such things.
In addition to all this, an eBay goon squad flew to Boston and attempted to harass and monitor the couple, in part by placing a GPS device on their car - all orchestrated from a Boston hotel where one executive listened to a Natick police channel to warn his fellow corporate thugs if police seemed to be on the way. Later, they lied to a Natick police detective, whom they derided as a stupid hick, only he proved to play a key role in their undoing when he went to the FBI for help.
Several of the executives and employees were arrested and convicted on federal charges. One executive, security head Jim Baugh, got nearly five years in prison. The company's CEO at the time, Devin Wenig, was referenced, but not by name, in federal charging documents. He was never charged, but did lose his job. In addition to Baugh, former head of security, the convicted eBay minions are:
David Harville, former Director of Global Resiliency, who was sentenced to 24 months in prison in September 2022; Stephanie Popp, former Senior Manager of Global Intelligence, who was sentenced to 12 months in prison in October 2022; Philip Cooke, a former Senior Manager of Security Operations, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison and 12 months of home confinement in July 2021; Stephanie Stockwell and Veronica Zea, a former Manager of Global Intelligence and a contract intelligence analyst, respectively, who were each sentenced to one year in home confinement in October and November 2022. Brian Gilbert, a former Senior Manager of Security Operations, has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.
Complete federal "information" against eBay (2.4M PDF).
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Comments
Wow . Absolute scum. Will
Wow . Absolute scum. Will never use eBay again.
So if I understand correctly,
So if I understand correctly, the plan was to mail them gross things, order pizzas to their house, and try to get people to come to fake sex parties there? A $3 million fine is going to be the least of eBay's worries once the government finds out they have a bunch of 11-year-olds working there.
Read the rest of the post ...
Seven actual eBay executives, employees and contractors were previously criminally charged. Some got prison terms.
You don’t
Try knowing wtf you’re talking about before shooting your mouth off?
And if you just can't get enough ...
Of this horrible, loathsome example of corporate thuggery in overdrive, there's a documentary coming out on the whole thing.
Broken link
.
Sorry
Broken link fixed.
If it wasn't real
I'd think it was the premise of a Wes Anderson film.
Maybe Anderson, but…
…for my money, this is a Coen Brothers story!
I'm thinking
Tales from the Crypt
You couldn't sell a movie script that read like this
It had to be a documentary, because if you tried to sell this as a movie script no one would buy it because they'd say viewers would find it too unbelievable.
As a widow who grieves my
As a widow who grieves my young husband's sudden death from a brain aneurysm, this is terrible. Three million dollars is nice but nothing can make the pain of losing your soulmate go away.
Was there something about the
Was there something about the husnand dying? It sounds like they are both alive from what the article says.
The book used as a threat
The book used as a threat instead of what the author of the book intended which is a source of consolment for widows is all it took for me to get filled with anger.
From an earlier uhub post:
From an earlier uhub post: "On Aug. 12, she got a book, ordered through Amazon, titled 'Grief Diaries: Surviving the Loss of a Spouse.' "
Photo
John z, it seems you have decent reading comprehension skills but you need to pay closer attention to images, which also contain information.
Anon widow, I'm so sorry you are going through this.
Me again. Shout out to all
Me again. Shout out to all widows like me. Knowing that this jerk could send a book like this to be used as a threat to someone is making me fill up with anger and grief again. Widows unite!
It’s astounding how many people were …
… involved in this odious scheme. Not just a few rotten apples here. Sounds like the whole basket was rotten.
I'm still waiting for
The cruelty to animals charge for mailing insects to people who aren't scientists and weren't explicitly interested in caring for them.
The only human to be actually
The only human to be actually considered civilized is the one who is kind to animals.
Way too low of a price
It should be 6 months of revenue.
$3M is nothing for a company as large as eBay. What type of disincentive is it for other large firms to not screw with journalists they don't like? If the worst that happens is the firm need to pay a token amount and the CEO gets to hop to another lucrative venture, what's holding them back?
Not for nothing, but
Not for nothing, but donchyathink this group of evil should be watched a little more???
Yep
Say what you will about the EU and things like GDPR, but boy did it make American companies sit up and take notice when they enacted it with progressive fines for noncompliance, pinned to corporate revenue. If the loathsome humans described in this story had pulled something WAY less horrible in the EU rather than what they did in the US, the fines would been 9 figures, and would have forced EBay to cough up more money than what they could find between the couch cushions at corporate HQ. That's the only way to actually elicit change in bad corporate actors in our current dystopian capitalist hellscape.
Thanks for the followup
A lot of times, we never hear how things conclude.
Thanks!
More to come ...
We'll see what happens with the Steiners' lawsuit.