![]() Baugh, Harville and another eBay employee went to the couple’s home in the hopes of installing a GPS tracker on their car but the garage was locked, so Harville bought tools with a plan to break into it, prosecutors say. Ina Steiner began receiving dozens of strange emails from groups like an irritable bowel syndrome patient support group and the Communist Party of the United States, authorities say.Īuthorities portrayed Baugh as the mastermind of the scheme and said he directed eBay employees to use prepaid debit cards, disguises and overseas email accounts to hide the company’s involvement.īaugh then recruited Harville to go with him to Boston to spy on the couple, authorities say. Bizarre anonymous packages started arriving at the couple’s home, including a box of live spiders, a funeral wreath and a book about surviving the loss of a spouse. Soon, Ina Steiner began receiving harassing and sometimes threatening Twitter messages. That executive sent Wenig’s message to Baugh and called Ina Steiner a “biased troll who needs to get BURNED DOWN”.ĭavid and Ina Steiner at the courthouse for the sentencing hearings for former eBay executives. A half-hour after the article was published, then-CEO Devin Wenig sent another top eBay executive a message saying: “If you are ever going to take her down … now is the time,” according to court documents. The scheme was hatched in August 2019 after Ina Steiner wrote a story about a lawsuit brought by eBay accusing Amazon of poaching its sellers. “This was a bizarre, premeditated assault on our lives … with buy-in at the highest levels of eBay,” Steiner told the judge.Īnother former eBay executive, David Harville, was sentenced later on Thursday to two years behind bars for his role in the scheme targeting David and Ina Steiner, the publisher and reporter who angered executives with coverage of the company in their newsletter, eCommerceBytes.īaugh and Harville, eBay’s one-time director of global resiliency, are among seven former employees who have pleaded guilty to charges in the case.Ĭourt records in the case show how the top eBay executives became enraged by the Steiners’ newsletter and readers who posted comments criticizing the company on their site, which eBay viewed as a threat to its business. ![]() He expressed fear that other companies would use it as a blueprint to go after journalists in the future. David Steiner, who along with his wife was the target of the harassment campaign, told the court that eBay’s former senior director of safety and security James Baugh and other eBay employees made their lives “a living hell”.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |