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'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout
- QuantumNomad_ 3mo agohttps://archive.is/dNAEY https://archive.is/dNAEY
- haunter 3mo agoBrian 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-cyberstalking-case-sentenced https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/final-defendant-ebay-cybe...
- robotswantdata 3mo agoWhen will the executives face criminal trial too? “ The seven members of eBay’s security team were all criminally charged and sentenced to prison, home confinement or time served. Other executives went on to other corporate jobs. Wymer and Wenig left eBay in September 2019, before the charges were filed. The following year, Wymer was appointed chief of the non-profit Boys and Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley. Wenig has been on General Motors’ board since 2018 and now runs an AI start-up. Jones remained at eBay until 2020 and now sits on Prudential Financial’s board. The Steiners sued the trio and other former executives along with the company in the case that led to the $56mn payout. Under the terms of the settlement, Wenig agreed to pay $2mn, Jones must contribute $500,000 and Wymer $50,000, according to the pair’s lawyers.”
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- polytely 3mo agoDo we know what AI startup? I think its important for people to know when they do business with that startup.
- dqv 3mo agohttps://symbolic.ai/team https://symbolic.ai/team
- formerlurker 3mo ago“The first AI platform created for professional journalists, communicators, and publishers.” It’s quite ironic that he went on to cater to communicators after harassing bloggers.
- dylan604 3mo agoDream a little dream of the world you want, then be prepared for the alarm to go off to rejoin the real world. An insignificant number of people care and while everyone else does business with anyone as long as there's benefit for them. As exhibit A, I present all of history
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago> As exhibit A, I present all of history History shows tiny effort pays off massively. To the extent you have a point, it’s in people creating elaborate excuses for lazy nihilism across time.
- lovich 3mo agoI wonder if Captain Boycott would agree.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott
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- 12_throw_away 3mo agoAnd on the other hand, let's see how the C-suite made out: Wymer was appointed chief of the non-profit Boys and Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley. Wenig has been on General Motors’ board since 2018 and now runs an AI start-up. Jones remained at eBay until 2020 and now sits on Prudential Financial’s board. (These were the Chief Communication Officer, CEO, and SVP for Global Operations, respectively)
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago> Wymer was appointed chief of the non-profit Boys and Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley Boys and Girls Club of Silicon Valley lists its corporate donors as including Alliance Roofing · Amgen Foundation · Applied Materials · ASML · Comcast · Deloitte · EY · First Tech Federal Credit Union · Fremont Bank Foundation · Groundworks · Microsoft · NetApp · Peninsula Building Materials (PBM) · Project Learn / Panda Cares · Rite Aid Healthy Futures. If you work at or with any of these, flag this reporting to them. The organization also appears to work with the City of San Jose and the Morgan Hill school district. (An abusive alleged excon running a kids’ charity is absurd to the point of being hilarious. Whoever was supposed to vet him for hiring should also find a new calling.)
- cogogo 3mo agoI adore our local boys and girls club, our kids are there every weekday and they adore it too. We have donated a little bit of money monthly for almost a decade. I do not love the big money vanity donors but they are what make the place tick. This is another level… I would be so angry if this clown were running our metro area. I feel obligated to write letters to all of those donors even though we are on the other coast.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago> our kids are there every weekday and they adore it too. We have donated a little bit of money monthly for almost a decade Write to the national organization. Like, this guy is credibly accused of—and has settled claims around—seriously abusive behavior. He should not be around kids. Simple, one page: I am a donor and a parent who trusts their kids to your organization. I saw this reporting and was shocked. It may honestly not be on their radars.
- happytoexplain 3mo agoNo consequences for executives, and yet their ostensibly enormous responsibility is how their salaries and benefits are always justified.
- jimnotgym 3mo agoWhat I really don't understand is why the security people who sent to jail didn't drop their boss in it in return for diminishing their role
- vlovich123 3mo agoCush consulting jobs after the fact. You don’t burn your social network unless the alternate is serious jail time. Given the slaps on the wrists described, clearly the after conviction pay day is more valuable.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago> Cush consulting jobs after Do you have evidence any of these folks got these?
- Barbing 3mo agoOr generally, if any tech criminals now show nice consulting gigs on their LinkedIns and seem to have traction. Wonder if any Enron perps are doing well, or Bernie Madoff’s associates, or if Elizabeth Holmes or SBF had righthand men…
- a4isms 3mo agoThis is well before most HN readers' time, but Michael Milken, the "Junk Bond King," was handed a $600,000,000 fine and a ten-year prison sentance for insider trading and racketeering. He was also barred from reëntering the securities industry. When he was released from prison after serving less than two years, he became a "consultant" charging a flat $25 million fee for his services, which avoided the ban on working in the securities industry. Trump pardoned him in 2020. Consequences are incredibly elastic for people at the top of the food chain.
- deathanatos 3mo ago> eBay entered into a deferred prosecution agreement and admitted to a detailed recitation of all the relevant facts about its conduct and agreed to pay a criminal penalty of $3 million, which is the statutory maximum fine for these six felony offenses. Scaled from eBay's $11.1B/y to a person making $70k/y, that's proportional to a $18.92 fine. "The statutory maximum for these six felony offenses."
- _dark_matter_ 3mo agoI think it should be scaled to the salary of 6 people. So about $3.15
- dredmorbius 3mo agoThere'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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49079244> (6 comments) had the most activity. So no, this wouldn't count as a dupe.
- evan_ 3mo agoI 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.
- 12_throw_away 3mo agoFrom the facts that came out at his trial [1], it seems like Baugh, the guy who ran the operation, was basically feral. At one point during his cross-country trip to harass these people, he was also trying to organize a blackmail campaign (with eBay personnel and resources) against a prosecutor in Arkansas who was charging his father with something? [2] [1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18602070/united-states-v-baugh/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18602070/united-states-... [2] Page 19, https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.227405/gov.uscourts.mad.227405.239.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.227...
- Zigurd 3mo agoCorporate security is the most sought after gig for cops. It attracts the best of the best. Certainly the most ambitious. If someone were to ever dump the texts and emails of a major city PD, it would open a lot of eyes.
- psd1 3mo agoIt might do, if that city had some level of public trust in its police. I don't know what, say, Los Angeles coppers could commit to record that might lower opinions. Beating confessions out of golden eagles? Cannibalism? The mark of the beast? Everyone already assumes they do this.
- glenstein 3mo ago
- charcircuit 3mo ago[flagged]
- marcelox86 3mo agoWhat an insane thing to say
- lucasrufkahr 3mo agono way you’re serious
- inigyou 3mo agoa felony is still a felony if you do it on the internet
- charcircuit 3mo ago[flagged]
- jknoepfler 3mo agoWhat in the hell is that supposed to mean? 7 members of the security team of a mega corporation cooperated in a sustained, coordinated, criminal campaign to intimidate journalists critical of eBay. The journalists, well within their rights, went to the law. The state brought criminal charges against the 7 employees, and they served/are serving time. The journalists further brought a civil complaint, and were compensated handsomely.
- charcircuit 3mo ago[flagged]
- evan_ 3mo agoWhy should anyone who's not a Klingon care about "honor"?
- inigyou 3mo agoGood to know I can buy FT Digital Edition for undefined per month to read this article.
- theyliesoeasily 3mo ago$<surveillance price pending>
- inigyou 3mo agoOof. I didn't even think of that.
- aucisson_masque 3mo agoSide 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.
- Arainach 3mo ago> It looks absolutely insane to me, but some people seem to defend it. Before that policy, you had a bunch of items listed for $1 + $60 "shipping" to dodge fees. I'll take the current structure over that.
- asdff 3mo agoStuff is still getting listed like that on ebay.
- kube-system 3mo agoI use ebay heavily and I don't see it anymore, except for things that look like typos or people who clearly just don't know how to use ebay. There's no advantage to doing so because sorting/filtering includes shipping.
- account42 3mo agoSorting isn't strict (or perhaps affected by paid placements?) so buyers still have to look at the prices to see which item is actually the cheapest.
- kube-system 3mo agoSorting is strict when you select "Price + Shipping: lowest first", for the main results. It's been that way since they started adding fees to shipping.
- alexpotato 3mo agoScott 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams
- PunchyHamster 3mo ago"Trust but verify" and "Locks keep honest people honest" Some people might be absolutely moral, but most just don't want to experience consequences
- energy123 3mo agoIn one of my college courses, 100% of my fellow students cheated, including me. This is when I learned that virtually every person is deep down a liar and a cheat if they think they won't face consequences and it's in their benefit, and any public facade of virtue that people put up, common in this industry, is a manipulation strategy that is just more cheating, although of a different kind.
- robomc 3mo agoi don't even understand the benefit of cheating on a college course, unless you think you're going to fail
- metalman 3mo agoit's difficult to believ that this was there first time doing this
- ebbi 3mo agoI 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.
- BobbyTables2 3mo agoThere has to have been more going on, it sure doesn’t add up - unless Ebay was run by a group of cruel Kindergarteners.. At every place I’ve worked, the employees likely had worse thoughts, at least at times, than anything an outsider could publish about the company.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- devilfileprong 3mo ago[flagged]
- hn773746483 3mo agoI 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 :^).
- informal007 3mo agohttps://archive.ph/qialH https://archive.ph/qialH
- jimkortge 3mo agoBehind the Bastards podcast did a series of episodes about this: https://youtu.be/pJhc7TBkVz4 https://youtu.be/pJhc7TBkVz4
- ltbarcly3 3mo agoI 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.
- 3dedb728-3f77 3mo agoThat is a threat?
- ltbarcly3 3mo agoShe was saying if I kept emailing the CEO I was going to get fired, yes.
- zhivota 3mo agoI worked at Milo and Wenig always seemed like an empty suit. Had much better experiences with Donahoe who helped us with the homepage revamp (I was on that team). One thing I learned through that project was that eBay was a den of vipers when it comes to corporate backstabbing and turf protection, and since then I've come to believe every company above a certain employee count will inevitably become this due to unavoidable incentive pressure.
- ltbarcly3 3mo agoI was also at Milo! Have you noticed that the current ebay homepage is very close (but still not as good) as the original Feed demo? My analysis of big companies, at least slow growth shitty ones like ebay, is that at VP and above levels there is a constant war of everyone against everyone to try to manage the largest organization and thus demand the best pay and promotion possibilities either at that company or by jumping ship. There's a zero-sum game, if everyone is B tier then everyone stays where they are and gets the same pay. Since the people at that level at companies like that tend to be imbeciles hired through nepotism or as a reward for previous crooked acquisitions or insider deals the easiest way to look better than your peers is to sabotage them. Since the next level up management is even more likely to be there due to nepotism of one kind of another they get away it. I remember some large projects I was on where within 2 weeks of the project starting people were already setting up to place the blame on other teams when the project failed. It didn't matter if anything shipped, it only mattered that you weren't the team blamed for it not shipping.
- 3dedb728-3f77 3mo agoKinda insane that they felt pressured by a blog like ecommercebytes.
- naikrovek 3mo agoEvery time I hear someone say “the private sector will self-govern” or anything of the kind, I think of any one of the probably tens of thousands of examples of this that history knows about. If there is any one thing that capitalism can not and will not ever do, is reward a self-governing company in any way. Add human nature in the mix and you get vindictive human scum like these people. Or any one of tens of thousands of other people (100s of millions, really) who would gladly crush another human without ever even feeling bad about it, never mind having the wherewithal to stop and think “hey this may not be a great idea”. A human without power is a danger to others. Add this to the mountain of evidence proving it.