'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

Brian Gilbert, 56, of San Jose, Calif., former Senior Manager of Special Operations for eBay’s Global Security Team, was sentenced to time served, one year of supervised release with the special condition that he have no contact with either of the victims in the case and a $20,000 fine

Jim Baugh, 47, of San Jose, Calif., eBay’s former Senior Director of Safety and Security, was sentenced to 57 months in prison

David Harville, 50, of Las Vegas, Nev., former Director of Global Resiliency, was sentenced to 24 months in prison

Stephanie Popp, 34, of Louisville, Ky., former Senior Manager of Global Intelligence, was sentenced to 12 months in prison

Philip Cooke, 56, of San Jose, Calif., a former Senior Manager of Security Operations, was sentenced to 18 months in prison and 12 months of home confinement

Stephanie Stockwell, 28, of Redwood City, Calif., a former Manager of Global Intelligence, was sentenced to one year in home confinement

Veronica Zea, 28, of San Jose, Calif., a contract intelligence analyst, was sentenced to one year in home confinement

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/final-defendant-ebay-cybe...

I assume this has been investigated but it's difficult to believe this stopped at one pair of critics. There are plenty of people online critical of eBay. Were they running similar campaigns on anyone else?

> Seven members of eBay’s security team, including former police captains, “worked together to harass and intimidate the Steiners”, according to prosecutors.

I hope someone's looking into the careers of the "former police captains" here. Again, difficult to believe they just woke up one day and decided to fly cross-country to vandalize someone's house with no prior history of intimidation.

Kinda insane that they felt pressured by a blog like ecommercebytes.

Side note but did anyone here tried to sell stuff on eBay ?

Their pricing are insane, they take a cut on your product price, but also on the delivery method and even on the taxes !

It amounts to about 13% of total price, including delivery and taxes.

It looks absolutely insane to me, but some people seem to defend it.

To put some perspective, here in France we have an extremely profitable competitor called Leboncoin, it's crushing eBay shares in the country, and they take only 5% cut on the product price.

Scott Adams [0], who recently passed away, had a great line on human behavior (paraphrased):

Whenever people are unsupervised and there is a chance for fraud or bad behavior and, due to the lack of supervision, they believe they won't be caught, you should ALWAYS assume that people will behave badly.

For another example, the Google case where it was exposed how many nefarious activities they were up to around auction bidding.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams

Behind the Bastards podcast did a series of episodes about this: https://youtu.be/pJhc7TBkVz4

There've been a few recent submissions of this story over the past week or so, but none with significant discussion.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49079244> (6 comments) had the most activity.

So no, this wouldn't count as a dupe.

Good to know I can buy FT Digital Edition for undefined per month to read this article.

I was working at eBay as a Director of Engineering (the startup I work for was unfortunately acquired by eBay a few years earlier) at this time (none of us new any of this was going on of course), and I emailed the CEO about my concerns about the performance review process causing people to keep 'donkeys' on their team so they would have someone to give the Needs-Improvement review to (due to stack ranking) and an HR Sr. Director was literally sent to my desk to find me and "discuss my concerns" and she told me "a lot of people in this industry are paid more than they could get at another company and if they lost their job they might not be able to find another job as good". Luckily due to autism I just agreed with her and didn't realize it was a threat until years later or I likely would have said something unfortunate.

I imagine this kind of behavior is common everywhere, and the bodies responsible for enforcing things (examples: data protection, consumer protection) just go "hmmmm sorry we're understaffed", "we don't take action on everything" or just refuse to investigate internally because nobody would EVER blatantly break the law :^).

I just can't fathom how employees of a company would do all this because someone with a newsletter criticized the company often.

I understand employees committing fraud for their own gain. I don't understand Directors and analysts doing this to someone, especially when senior execs weren't charged. Seems like there were a lot of cover ups going on.

it's difficult to believ that this was there first time doing this

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