eBay Pays 56 Million Dollars for Spiders, Cockroaches and a Bloody Pig Mask: Seven Years From Threat to Accountability

Live spiders. Cockroaches. A bloody pig mask. A funeral wreath. A book on how to survive the death of a spouse. All of it arrived at a home address in 2019 - sent by people working at one of the world's largest online marketplaces.

eBay and several of its former employees have agreed to pay 56 million dollars (around 51 million euros) to married couple Ina and David Steiner, authors of the EcommerceBytes newsletter. Their offence was occasionally writing critically about the company.

Of the settlement, 46.15 million dollars is paid by eBay itself. Former chief executive Devin Wenig pays two million. Former executive Wendy Jones - 500,000 dollars. Former executive Steve Wymer - 50,000. Part of the money also goes to non-profit organisations.

The campaign was not one employee improvising after snapping. According to court documents published earlier, senior people at the company opened fake social media profiles to harass the couple, sent anonymous threats by post and ordered deliveries whose only purpose was fear. There was also a plan to attach a GPS device to the family's car - an attempt that failed. There was even an internal proposal to send a „Samoan gang” to the Steiners' home.

In 2022, seven former employees were criminally charged and pleaded guilty. Among them was the company's former head of security, James Baugh, sentenced to almost five years in prison. Also charged were David Harville, Brian Gilbert, Stephanie Popp, Stephanie Stockwell, Philip Cooke and external contractor Veronica Zea.

In its statement, eBay said the former employees' behaviour „is not representative of eBay's culture”. It is hard to read that sentence without noticing what is missing from it: an explanation of how a group of executives at a major corporation ran an intimidation campaign for nearly a year without anyone above them noticing.

„As we have long said, what the Steiners were subjected to by former eBay employees in 2019 was wrong, reprehensible and should never have happened,” the statement reads. „We continue to apologise most deeply to the Steiners.”

The couple's lawyer, Christopher Murphy, put the point more directly: „This case was always about more than financial damages. From the very beginning our clients wanted to uncover the truth, protect journalists and publishers, hold those responsible to account and prevent this from happening to anyone else.”

Seven years from the first delivery to the final payment. That is how long the road from threat to accountability takes when the other side is a corporation with a legal department. The question that remains is how many campaigns like this never reached a court because the target didn't have the time, money and persistence to last seven years.