Online marketplace eBay is seeking to resolve criminal charges related to a harassment campaign by an employee who sent live spiders, cockroaches and other disturbing items to a Massachusetts couple's home, according to court documents filed Thursday. , was ordered to pay $3 million.
The Justice Department charged eBay with four counts of corporate stalking (two through interstate travel and two through electronic communication services), witness tampering and obstruction of justice. stated in the press release.
Seven employees who carried out a campaign of cold-blooded intimidation against a Natick, Massachusetts-based couple already have felony convictions.
The ringleader received the most severe sentence, 57 months in federal prison, according to the Justice Department.
It all reportedly started in 2019 with an “online blackmail campaign” in which defendants Ina Steiner and David Steiner created an account on Twitter (now known as X) that posed as eBay sellers. ) was abused by
According to a lawsuit filed against eBay in July 2021, the Steiners, who run their own e-commerce trade publication called EcommerceBytes, were threatened to stop reporting on the auction giant.
According to court records, the article that allegedly spurred the harassment was an article Ina wrote in August 2019 about a lawsuit filed by eBay that accused Amazon of poaching sellers.
According to court documents, 30 minutes after the article was published, eBay's then-CEO Devin Wenig told another executive, “If you're going to oust her… now's the time.” He said he sent a message.
The executive sent Wenig's message to James Baugh, eBay's then-senior director of safety and security, calling Ina Steiner a “biased troll who deserves to be flamed.”
As the online threats continued, the couple began receiving disturbing packages, including Halloween masks of live cockroaches, spiders, and bloody pigs, and a book titled “Diary of Grief: Surviving the Loss of a Spouse.” It is said that
The company also tried to break into their garages to install GPS tracking devices to slander them and stop them from reporting on eBay, the suit says.
The Steiners also sued several eBay executives, claiming that the brutal ambush against them was not caused by employees, but rather was the result of company policy.
The Department of Justice determined on Thursday that eBay did, in fact, engage in harassment.
“EBay committed an absolutely horrifying criminal act,” Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua S. Levy of Massachusetts said in response to the agency's ruling. “The company's employees and contractors involved in this campaign put their victims through utter hell in a petrifying campaign aimed at silencing their reporting and protecting the eBay brand. ”
Representatives for eBay did not immediately respond to The Post's request for comment.
in Blog post published on EcommerceBytes “After today's announcement, we continue to seek answers and are determined to do everything we can to ensure that no company feels it has the option to quash an individual's First Amendment rights,” the Steiners said Thursday. “I'm doing it,” he said.
with post wire
