'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout
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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...
“ 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.”
It’s quite ironic that he went on to cater to communicators after harassing bloggers.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I don't think people at that level are really "vetted," these days[0].
[0] https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/on-the-run-for-20-yea...
Do you have evidence any of these folks got these?
Wonder if any Enron perps are doing well, or Bernie Madoff’s associates, or if Elizabeth Holmes or SBF had righthand men…
Trump pardoned him in 2020. Consequences are incredibly elastic for people at the top of the food chain.
From his company’s Wiki page, one of the former employees:
> … later arrested after 1995 air rage incident
Other winners listed too but that’s the only guy who pooped on a plane.
"You take care of it." means "Murder him and dump the body into a building foundation."
"I don't see any problems." can mean "The ambush will happen at the scheduled time. Vinnie will clean up the bodies."
etc.
You'll also see a lot of politicians using "dog whistle" statements, that are interpreted by listeners to mean something entirely different from the stated words.
Non-mobsters aren’t always as careful. There is a good chance these guys just weren’t properly investigated.
It was implicit that they wanted someone killed but if brought up in court they could say "I was just expressing an opinion, not giving an order"
This vastly overestimates the opsec of most tech executives.
When I refused he called me into a 1:1 and verbally told me I would be losing my job if I didn’t and only backed off when I told him he was never getting that paper back and asked if he wanted to go HR right now at which point I would be going to legal and didn’t care if I lost my job as long as he was implicated.
Only time in my career it’s happened, but it happens.
1) phones. In California, you get a lot of protection just calling the guy. Use this. Only call people in California.
2) never lie on an email (regarding money, asking for services, providing services)
3) never lie on a phone (regarding money, asking for services, providing services)
4) lying in person is fine
5) anything that MUST be written down must be deleted after read and have no trace back. (privnote etc)
6) all email services should be hosted overseas (protonmail etc)
For all we know it is a honeypot. For all we know, everything is a honeypot.
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."
> 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.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18602070/united-states-...
[2] Page 19, https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.227...
If someone were to ever dump the texts and emails of a major city PD, it would open a lot of eyes.
So I'm ready to believe it might have only been one. Although it naturally raises the question. You can't imagine they would volunteer data on additional harassment campaigns.
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.
Some people might be absolutely moral, but most just don't want to experience consequences
If I was in a course where it was so poorly taught that cheating was the only feasible way to pass, I'd go talk to the dean. Things like that don't get fixed unless people complain, because how would anyone making decisions know?
It sometimes works, there's no reason to leave stuff like that for the next group of people to suffer through too. E.g. I'm extremely proud of my wife for this kind of thing, as she managed to get nearly a whole class to complain about an awful pseudo-science-pushing teacher, and got them kicked out in fairly short order.
I would argue that the opposite is true, that people are more likely to lie or cheat to avoid consequences, especially significant consequences.
This is why, the aviation industry that has made commercial flying safer than other transportation modes, grants immunity for reporting incidents [1].
I understand what you’re inferring, just official transcripts aren’t free or easy enough.
Despite all the talk about "academic integrity" and whatnot, very rarely were there punishments for people who cheated. For every professor that wrote FRAUD in the grade sheet and escalated to the Disciplinary Committee, there were 100 that turned a blind eye or at most confiscated a paper being passed around when the exam was being administered. This hypocrisy irked me much more than the cheating itself, in which I didn't partake mostly because 1) I thought it was kind of beneath me, something only mediocre students did (which I came to realize was not really true) and 2) I didn't care that much about the grade.
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies...
Do you have any evidence to support your claim?
On the contrary, a 2019 analysis [1] combined 400+ experimental treatments, 44,000+ participants, and 47 countries. Participants surrendered roughly three-quarters of the money they could have obtained through maximal lying. In repeated experiments, fewer than one participant in twenty consistently claimed the payoff-maximizing outcome. Increasing the potential reward from a few cents to approximately $50 did not cause people to approach maximal dishonesty.
In a field experiment [2] with 17,000+ apparently lost wallets in 355 cities across 40 countries, people were generally more likely to report wallets containing money than wallets containing no money. The effect appeared in 38 of the 40 countries. The researchers’ follow-up evidence pointed to concern for the owner and an increased aversion to thinking of oneself as a thief when more money was involved.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.3982/ECTA14673
And you show up with a study.
Sorry but I had to point this out.
It's not all people, but always people.
People also believed in witches, ghosts and other paranormal and magic phenomena for millennia. Didn't make it reality.
> It's not all people, but always people.
Approx. 1% of the general population are estimated to be psychopaths, with broader estimates going up to 4.5% depending on which diagnostic tool is used. [1]
Rates are significantly higher in specific environments - for example, 15% to 25% in prison inmates. [2]
Does it make sense to tar the 95% for the sins of the 5%?
> Does it make sense to tar the 95% for the sins of the 5%?
Only if one exhibits psychopathic tendencies :-)
There's also the bagel study [3] that shows, among many other interesting stats, that folks up the corporate ladder tend to steal more than those on the lower rungs. Some of the other stats in that study support the notion that people are generally honest, in line with the formal experiments.
Since most society is organized hierarchically, negative behavior at the top can propagate throughout the org. Google's 'Don't be evil' motto comes to mind.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8374040/
[2] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-psychopathy
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/magazine/what-the-bagel-m...
Idle hands are the devil's workshop. / The devil makes work for idle hands.
When the leave is too long, the soldier goes wrong.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cursedcomments/comments/wqc1an/curs...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used to offer listings to the world, now I just add Japan for the odd rare item.
Super niche stuff you need to be able to advertise to Timbuktu & Japan & LA & NY in hopes of finding a single buyer… fine take your 15%.
Great place to buy new stuff w/o enriching Bezos. Filter Buy It Now + Lowest Price First & hope they’ve fixed the “list a 99 cent cable alongside the $15 widgets you actually want, or price cap + use Best Match.
He's much happier doing live auctions on WhatNot these days, which seems to be eating into eBay's business
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.
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.
I’ve been in the corporate world long enough in my life to know that that is not out of the question
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49079244> (6 comments) had the most activity.
So no, this wouldn't count as a dupe.
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.