E-commerce company eBay will have to pay a couple $3 million after a handful of its employees took it upon themselves to turn their lives into a nightmare because they criticized the company in a newsletter to sellers.
“The company's employees and contractors involved in this campaign put victims through hell in a frightening campaign to silence their reporting and protect the eBay brand,” Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy said Thursday, according to CNN .
The Massachusetts court did nothing on Thursday, imposing a maximum fine of $3 million on the eBay company for a horrific campaign of intimidation and harassment allegedly carried out by its employees. According to American media, they lived with a couple in 2019.
In fact, the tone Ina and David Steiner used in an online newsletter aimed at providing information to eBay sellers would not have pleased certain employees, who then tracked down the pair to send them several frightening packages.
Among them, the couple received “a box of live cockroaches,” “a book about surviving the loss of a spouse and pornography,” as the Justice Department noted in an earlier press release, but also a bloody pig mask. according to CNN, a fetal pig and a funeral wreath.
According to American media, some employees even monitored the couple's home and installed GPS tracking devices on their vehicles or even published their address on Craigslist and invited the public to engage in sexual activity.
In total, six employees would be prosecuted, while Jim Baugh, eBay's then-senior security director, whom prosecutors see as the “ringleader” of the affair, was sentenced in September 2022 to 57 months in prison, reportedly for his role.
“We continue to deeply apologize to the Steiners for what they have had to endure. Since these events occurred, new leaders have joined the company and eBay has strengthened its policies, procedures, controls and training,” eBay CEO Jamie Iannone said Thursday.