Pig carcasses in the mail: Ebay critics report on the terror by employees of the group

The indictment made waves around the world: Six Ebay employees, including the former security chief, were accused of systematically terrorizing two critics of the company. Now the first of them has been sentenced to prison. And the bullying victims Ina and David Steiner were ready for the first time to tell their side of a story that previously could only be guessed from the court files.

It all started with a graffito, the two say in their first interview with the “Boston Globe”. A neighbor pointed out to David that someone had sprayed something on their fence, he says. The word sprayed: “Fidomaster”. “It didn’t make any sense,” says Ina. “I immediately Googled to see if it was a word used by the youth.”

From Ebay seller to target person

But that was not the case. Fidomaster, that was the pseudonym of a reader of your newsletter. The two run the “EcommerceBytes” portal, which deals with the Ebay group, gives tips on sales and sometimes criticizes the group’s strategic direction. Many of their readers could understand that too – or, like Fidomaster, were even more critical. But the couple still couldn’t do anything with the graffito. Are they accused of being Fidomaster? Was the person behind it? “That was really grueling,” remembers Ina Steiner. But it was nothing compared to what was to come after that.

Actually, the Steiners never wanted to harm anyone. When Ebay was very new, in 1999 they had started browsing flea markets to make money from sales on Ebay. In doing so, they noticed: Even good pieces sometimes go under value if the strategy is not right. With their newsletter, which was initially called “Auctionbytes”, they wanted to give other sellers tips on how things could work better. In the course of the change in the group, the newsletter was also adapted, they changed the name and criticized the company more and more often. And probably also drew his anger.

This is shown by internal messages from the group, which were taken as evidence in the course of the legal proceedings against six employees. Accordingly, the then CEO Devin Wenig had been upset with his communications boss Steve Wymer about the couple’s reporting: They had reported that as CEO he earned more than 152 times as much as small employees. Wymer, in turn, passed the complaint on to global security chief James Baugh. Who then, according to the indictment, took matters into their own hands together with a small team. And a terror campaign against the Steiners began.

“It was really scary”

At first it started harmlessly after the graffiti, the couple report. Suddenly they would have received dozens of newsletters they hadn’t signed up for, from support groups for intestinal complaints to the Church of Satan, which is formally organized in the USA, to harsh sex and S&M groups. Then there was a wave of abuse on Twitter. The two of them still thought nothing of it. “If you are on the Internet long enough, you learn not to feed the trolls,” Ina believes. That’s why she initially reacted as always: “Just don’t react, don’t encourage them.”

But unfortunately it did not stop with digital harassment. The phone rang two days after the first Twitter tirade. A stuffing company wanted to double-check their order because the order address did not match the credit card. The ordered goods: the carcass of a piglet. “I thought: Now it’s off, from online to the real world,” Ina remembers. “It was really scary.”

After canceling the order, they decided to call the police. The next shock came while a policeman was still in the house. Ina, screeching with fright, discovered hair and skin in a package that had just been delivered. It was a bloody pig mask from a film in the horror series “Saw”. The policeman also included this package in his report.

Black vans and night visits

After that, the situation continued to escalate. Addressed to David, a book on dealing with the loss of a loved one arrived, a package of living spider and fly larvae. A messenger deposited a $ 255 death wreath for David.

Then the dark vans appeared. Black SUVs with New York license plates kept popping up around the Steiners’ home in Nattick, Massachusetts, following them through town. “We felt we were in danger. We felt like a target,” said Ina. “I can still remember exactly how my hair stood on end,” said David, recalling a chase situation. When the desperate police arrived, the van was gone.

Sleepless nights

Days of fear began for the couple. They slept separately in order to wake up in time should something happen to one of them. When David looked sleepless out the window at 4:30 a.m., suddenly a man came across the lawn. After David yelled at him, he reacted in shock: He was only supposed to deliver one pizza to the two of them. “We thought he had a gun,” recalls the frightened Ina. The feeling stayed. “You couldn’t turn off this pure terror, there was no switch,” says David, describing what the couple suffered.

Then came the breakthrough. When another car followed him, David managed to catch a snapshot of the license plate with his smartphone in front of a police station. A short time later the handcuffs clicked: the car had been assigned to an eBay employee. The team’s internal messages showed they knew they were in a tight spot. But after two more volleys of tweets, the Steiners’ nightmare was over.

Escalated campaign

They only found out how big the conspiracy against them was through the subsequent investigation against the Internet giant, in which the FBI was also involved. Without the Steiners’ knowledge, some Ebay employees had booked into a Ritz hotel in the two hometowns. According to the prosecution, they even planned to put a tracker on the Steiners’ car, but failed because their car was parked in the closed garage. The couple hadn’t noticed anything.

How exactly the escalation came about is difficult to understand. After the first lawsuit against the six employees was brought last summer, the first trial that has just been completed against one of the parties involved provided initial insights. “It’s completely crazy,” admitted judge Allison Burroughs, stunned. “The idea of ​​adult people sitting down and devising this plan is incomprehensible to me.”

First offender convicted

The first verdict was correspondingly harsh: the former police officer, Philip Cooke, who was employed by Ebay as a security manager at the time, was sentenced to 18 months in prison and a $ 15,000 fine. He stated that he had been “manipulated” by his superior Baugh and that he was able to prevent many more far-reaching plans with objections.

Ebay reacted quickly, fired all the accused and started its own investigation. The came to a clear result: You could not find any more guilt in the higher management, said the group in a detailed apology to the couple. But there was one consequence anyway: CEO Devin Wenig was fired a few months after the scandal first became known, the incident “played a role” despite the lack of evidence. But little does not have to suffer hardship: His severance payment was just under $ 57 million.