The most disturbing corporate harassment campaign in recent tech history has a price. eBay and three of its former executives will pay nearly $56m to the couple they set out to destroy for writing a critical newsletter.

David and Ina Steiner of Natick, Massachusetts, run EcommerceBytes, a small newsletter that covers online selling. In 2019, their coverage annoyed senior eBay executives enough that the company mounted a campaign to silence them. Six years and a criminal case later, the civil suit is finally settled.

What they were sent

The details still read like fiction. eBay staff sent live cockroaches and spiders to the Steiners’ home, along with a funeral wreath, a bloody pig mask and a book about surviving the death of a spouse. They mailed pornographic magazines in David’s name to a neighbour. They threatened the couple online through fake accounts.

Then it turned physical. Employees flew from California to Massachusetts to surveil the couple and tried to fit a GPS tracker to their car. One plan, never carried out, was to send a “Samoan gang” to their house. The trigger, in part, was an article headlined “eBay CEO Devin Wenig Earns 152 Times That of Employees.”

The words in the messages

Court filings captured how casually it was ordered. Wenig, then chief executive, texted that it was time to “take her down,” meaning Ina Steiner. Steve Wymer, the communications chief, went further, Ars Technica reported. “I want to see ashes,” he wrote. “As long as it takes. Whatever it takes.”

Seven eBay employees and contractors pleaded guilty. The former security chief, James Baugh, got nearly five years in prison. eBay itself paid a $3m criminal fine in 2024. We covered the original charges back in 2020. Wenig and Wymer were never charged, and both deny knowing what their orders set in motion.

Why the money is not the point

The headline figure breaks down as $46.15m from eBay, $2m from Wenig, $500,000 from former operations chief Wendy Jones and $50,000 from Wymer, plus $6m in charity and another $1m from Wenig to a press-freedom group in Ina Steiner’s name.

For eBay, that is almost nothing. The company clears more than $3bn in revenue a quarter, so $46m is a rounding error, the kind of sum big firms usually pay to make a problem quietly disappear. This one will not disappear quietly. The Steiners refused a confidentiality clause. There is no NDA, the court file stays open, and eBay was forced to issue a public statement calling the conduct “wrong, reprehensible” and admitting the “unprofessional tone” of its former bosses.

The real deterrent

That is what the couple actually won. Not just a cheque, but the right to keep talking about what happened to them. “This was not only an attack and campaign of harassment against two people,” their lawyer Christopher Murphy said. “It was also an attack on free speech and freedom of the press.”

Ina Steiner made the same point to the Associated Press. She and her husband insisted the deal be public, she said, “as reporters who believe in transparency,” and in the hope “this case will serve as a deterrent.” A company that tried to make its critics vanish has been made to answer for it, in writing, where everyone can read it. As tech firms face juries in addiction and product-design cases, that public reckoning may matter more than the money.

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