Feds charge eBay over employees who sent live spiders and cockroaches to couple; company to pay $3M
BOSTON — Online retailer eBay Inc. will pay a $3 million fine to resolve criminal charges over a campaign of harassment waged by employees who sent live spiders, cockroaches and other disturbing objects to the home of a Massachusetts couple, according to court documents filed Thursday.
The Justice Department has charged eBay with stalking and other crimes in a criminal investigation, more than three years after its employees were prosecuted in the elaborate scheme to intimidate David and Ina Steiner. The couple produced an online newsletter called EcommerceBytes, which upset eBay executives with its reporting.
EBay has entered into a deferred prosecution agreement that could lead to charges against the California-headquartered company being dismissed if it meets certain conditions, the U.S. attorney’s office in Massachusetts said.
The Steiners, the publisher and editor of the newsletter, have also sued the e-commerce giant in federal court, describing how cyberstalking and disrupting the delivery of anonymously shipped packages turned their lives upside down.
Ina Steiner received harassing and sometimes threatening Twitter messages and dozens of strange emails from groups such as an irritable bowel syndrome patient support group and the Communist Party of the United States.
Along with a box of live spiders and cockroaches, the couple had a funeral wreath, a bloody pig mask and a book about surviving the loss of a spouse delivered to their door. Their home address was also posted online with announcements inviting strangers to yard sales and parties.
The harassment began in 2019 after Ina Steiner wrote a story about a lawsuit filed by eBay accusing Amazon of poaching its sellers, court records show.
Half an hour after the article was published, eBay’s then-CEO Devin Wenig messaged another executive saying, “If you’re ever going to take her down… now is the time,” according to court documents. The executive sent Wenig’s message to James Baugh, eBay’s senior director of safety and security, calling Ina Steiner a “biased troll who should be BURNED.”
Baugh was one of seven former employees who ultimately pleaded guilty to charges in the case. He was sentenced to almost five years in prison in 2022. Another former director, David Harville, was sentenced to two years.
Wenig, who resigned as CEO in 2019, was not criminally charged in the case and denied having any knowledge of the harassment campaign or ever telling anyone to do anything illegal. In the civil case, his lawyers have said the quote “take her down” was taken out of context and that the logical inference should be that he was referring to taking “lawful action,” not “a series of bizarre criminal acts ‘.
Baugh, who prosecutors described as the mastermind of the scheme, at one point recruited Harville to go with him to Boston to spy on the Steiners, authorities said. Baugh, Harville and another eBay employee went to the couple’s home in hopes of installing a GPS tracker on their car, prosecutors said. The trio found the garage locked, so Harville bought tools with a plan to break in, prosecutors said.
Harville’s lawyers have said he had no involvement or knowledge of the threatening messages or deliveries sent by his colleagues.
Baugh’s attorneys have said their client faced relentless pressure from Wenig and other executives to do something about the Steiners. Baugh claimed he was then fired by the company when “an army of outside lawyers descended on us to conduct an ‘internal investigation’ aimed at saving the company and its top executives from prosecution.”