US5 min(s) read
Published 16:27 30 Jul 2026 GMT
Over three weeks in August 2019, someone sent a married couple in Natick, Massachusetts, packages containing live cockroaches, live spiders, fly larvae, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath, and a fetal pig.
A book called Grief Diaries: Surviving Loss of a Spouse arrived addressed to the husband by name.
Pornographic magazines - also in his name - turned up at the neighbors' houses.
The packages were not from a stranger, they were sent by employees of eBay.
On Monday, eBay agreed to pay $55.7 million to settle the case.
The company's former CEO, Devin Wenig, is personally paying $2 million.
Two other former executives are contributing a further $550,000 between them. An additional $6 million is going to charity.
eBay called what happened 'wrong, reprehensible and should never have happened'.
That's definitely one way of putting it.
David and Ina Steiner run EcommerceBytes, a website and newsletter that covers the e-commerce industry.
They have been writing about eBay's fees, seller policies, and platform changes for years.
Their reporting is closely followed by online sellers and, apparently, by eBay's senior leadership.
Wenig, who was CEO at the time, was frustrated by the coverage.
Internal messages showed him telling another executive to 'take her down' in reference to Ina.
Another exec, Steve Jones, wrote that the company should 'clap back at Ina'.
A third, communications officer Steve Wymer, told subordinates to 'eff with her' and wrote: "I want to blow her site up."
What followed was not a PR strategy.
Seven members of eBay's security team, led by Senior Director of Safety and Security Jim Baugh, carried out a coordinated campaign to terrorise the Steiners into silence.
The deliveries were the most visible part.
Cockroaches, spiders, fly larvae, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath, a fetal pig, the grief book, the porn magazines. All anonymous, all arriving at the same house and all within a few weeks of each other.
But it went further than that.
They posted the couple's home address online alongside invitations for sexual activity at the property.
They sent graphic, threatening messages through Twitter and other platforms using fake accounts, including one pretending to be a disgruntled eBay seller.
They physically travelled to Natick and conducted surveillance of the couple.
They tried to install a GPS tracker on the Steiners' car. Investigators later traced a rental van that had been used to follow David around town.
"Never did we imagine doing our jobs as journalists would lead to this," David Steiner said when the civil lawsuit was filed in 2021.
All seven were charged by federal prosecutors in Massachusetts in June 2020.
Most pleaded guilty to conspiracy and cyberstalking.
Baugh, the 'ringleader', got 57 months in federal prison plus two years supervised release and a $40,000 fine.
David Harville, eBay's former Director of Global Resiliency, got two years plus two years supervised release and a $20,000 fine. The others received prison terms or home confinement.
eBay itself was criminally charged with stalking, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice.
The company entered a deferred prosecution agreement in 2024 and paid a $3 million criminal penalty, the statutory maximum for the offences.
$46.15 million from eBay. $2 million from Wenig personally. $500,000 from Steve Jones, the former Senior Vice President of global operations. $50,000 from Steve Wymer, the former Chief Communications Officer. Plus $6 million in charitable donations to nonprofits, funded by eBay and Wenig.
The Steiners had originally been seeking hundreds of millions in compensatory and punitive damages.
An agreement in principle was reached in February, but negotiations dragged on for months.
In June, the Steiners' lawyer told Judge Patti Saris that a deal could not be reached, and Saris rescheduled a jury trial for early 2027. The final settlement was reached on Monday.
Wenig has never been criminally charged. He maintained he did not know the details of what the security team was doing. But his "take her down" message was central to the lawsuit, and his $2 million personal contribution to the settlement says plenty about how the case would have looked to a jury.
In his statement, Wenig said: "The Steiners' right to publish content was always protected by the First Amendment, and protection of the press and the right to free speech are causes I have long supported and defended."
Because the details are so strange that people assume they are exaggerated. They are not. Every item on the list was documented in the Department of Justice's criminal investigation. Federal prosecutors confirmed all of it. Seven people went to prison over it.
Ina Steiner told the New York Times: "We wanted to find the truth.
"As victims you need to know: why did this happen to me?
"And we wanted it to be a deterrent, to have corporate executives think twice before they said words and set things in motion."
Their lawyer, Christopher Murphy, said the settlement 'sends a clear message that corporations and their executives cannot engage in this type of misconduct without facing significant consequences.'
The Steiners still live in Natick and EcommerceBytes is still publishing.
Now, eBay has written a cheque for $55.7 million because seven of its employees decided the best way to deal with a critical newsletter was to send the people who wrote it a bloody pig mask and a book about coping with the death of a husband.
