‘Crush this lady’: how eBay harassment campaign led to $56mn payout
Employees’ cyberstalking of Boston couple involving macabre deliveries ended in jail time and financial settlement
The disturbing packages started arriving on David and Ina Steiner’s doorstep in the Boston suburbs in August 2019: a box of live cockroaches. A bloody Halloween mask of a pig’s head. A funeral wreath. A book, titled Grief Diaries: Surviving Loss of a Spouse.
The Steiners had no idea who was sending them. All they knew was that for weeks, they had been the target of profane social-media posts attacking their blog, EcommerceBytes, a well-known chronicle for small businesspeople who make a living on ecommerce platforms such as eBay and Amazon.
“It was a campaign to ruin us and to make us stop our reporting,” Ina Steiner told the FT. “It was just so incomprehensible and terrifying.”
Police ultimately discovered where the harassment was coming from: eBay’s headquarters in San Jose, California, more than 3,000 miles away, where senior executives had become incensed by the couple’s coverage.
The ensuing legal fight has consumed seven years of the Steiners’ lives, concluding last week with a $56mn settlement from eBay and former employees.
Under the terms of the settlement, eBay’s former chief executive Devin Wenig agreed to pay $2mn to the Steiners
“In terms of a civil penalty from a company to journalists, this is unprecedented on an order of magnitude,” said Vincent Joralemon, a director at UC Berkeley Law and a former corporate lawyer.
It was a “David and Goliath situation”, said Ina.
In a way, the Steiners had been David to eBay’s Goliath for decades. The pair discovered the platform in 1999, when David Steiner decided to try selling old camera equipment. The sale went “flawlessly”, he said, and soon the couple were avid eBay sellers.
They launched EcommerceBytes to help plug what David described as a dearth of information about the platform in its early days. The blog became a popular resource for sellers and the Steiners’ full-time job.
In the early 2000s, the couple had a “very professional” relationship with eBay, David said. On calls with the company’s press officer, “sometimes we would argue”, he added, but meetings usually ended with a friendly chat about the Red Sox.
That relationship grew more tense in 2008, the Steiners said, as eBay increasingly catered to large retailers using the platform to liquidate inventory, rather than the individual sellers who loyally read EcommerceBytes.
“We saw a palpable shift in how eBay was treating the sellers, how eBay was responding to us,” said David.
The couple kept writing. In 2019, Ina reported on then-chief executive Devin Wenig commissioning a “lavish” replica of Walker’s, a New York City tavern, at eBay’s headquarters as the company’s profits declined. “That touched a nerve,” she said.
According to the Department of Justice, eBay unleashed what prosecutors described as “absolutely horrific” conduct that “put the victims through pure hell, in a petrifying campaign aimed at silencing their reporting”.
An executive whose description matches Wendy Jones, then eBay’s senior vice-president for global operations, referred to Ina as a “cow” in messages sent in 2019, according to court documents. EBay’s chief communications officer at the time, later identified as Steven Wymer, responded: “Her day is coming . . . Some times you just need to make an example out of someone”.
After EcommerceBytes reported on Wenig’s compensation, Wymer wrote to the then CEO: “We are going to crush this lady.”
Seven members of eBay’s security team, including former police captains, “worked together to harass and intimidate the Steiners”, according to prosecutors.
In addition to the packages and online harassment, eBay employees travelled from California to Massachusetts to follow David and subscribed to pornographic magazines in his name using his neighbour’s delivery address. They posted the couple’s home address online with an invitation for strangers to solicit them for sex.
“You can call the police and they can come and they can file a report, but then you are a prisoner in your own home because you’re afraid to leave the house,” said Ina.
Discovering eBay was responsible provided little solace. “The relief of at least finding out who it was lasted about 30 seconds,” she said. “And then we realised the full force of this multibillion-dollar corporation trying to destroy us. It was devastating.”
In a statement that the company issued under the terms of the settlement, eBay apologised to the Steiners and condemned “in the strongest terms possible” the employees linked to the harassment, which was “wrong, reprehensible and should never have happened”.
“We also acknowledge the unprofessional tone in internal communications,” eBay said, adding that the 2019 conduct did not reflect today’s culture. The company pleaded guilty to criminal charges in 2023 over the scheme and paid a $3mn penalty.
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.
In a statement, Wenig said that “the harassment was deliberately done in secret and without my knowledge”. Lawyers representing Wymer and Jones did not respond to requests for comment.
The Steiners still publish EcommerceBytes and participated in a documentary about their ordeal, Whatever It Takes: Inside the eBay Scandal, released in 2024.
“We continue to have nightmares, insomnia, hypervigilance, the sense of security completely gone,” Ina said. “It’s taken a toll on our relationship with each other and with our friends.
“I felt like it was never going to end.”
