This is one of the wildest corporate scandals of the last decade finally getting its price tag. eBay has agreed to pay close to $50 million to David and Ina Steiner, the husband-and-wife team behind the e-commerce newsletter EcommerceBytes, after a group of eBay's own former executives orchestrated a full-blown harassment campaign against them back in 2019. Why? Because the Steiners' newsletter kept publishing stuff about eBay that the company didn't love.
The headline numbers on the settlement, straight from the source.
Read that again: cockroaches, spiders, and a bloody pig mask, mailed anonymously to a couple who ran a niche trade newsletter. According to reporting on the case, the campaign didn't stop there — it also included a funeral wreath, a book about surviving the death of a spouse, and porn magazines sent to a neighbor's house with David Steiner's name on them. Investigators say the plot even got to the point of planning to install a GPS tracker on the couple's car. This wasn't some rogue troll account. It was allegedly run out of eBay's own security division.
The fallout was already brutal before this settlement. Federal prosecutors charged 7 former eBay employees in 2020, and most pleaded guilty to conspiracy and cyberstalking charges. James Baugh, eBay's former senior director of safety and security, got sentenced to nearly 5 years in prison in 2022. Now the company itself is finally cutting the check — the Steiners are set to receive $48.7 million total, with $46.15 million coming from eBay directly and smaller chunks coming personally from former CEO Devin Wenig, ex-executive Wendy Jones and ex-executive Steve Wymer. Another $7 million is earmarked for charitable donations, including groups that support First Amendment rights.
The reaction to eBay's approach to negative press, summed up in four words.
Bold strategy eBay https://t.co/h7wqul6ndN
The internet's reaction is basically "bold strategy," and it's not wrong — mailing bugs to journalists is about as counterproductive a crisis-comms move as a Fortune 500 company can make. What makes this settlement notable beyond the dollar figure is that it reportedly comes with no confidentiality clause, meaning the Steiners are free to keep talking about what happened to them. For a scandal this bizarre, that's basically the only outcome that makes sense — you don't get to terrorize a small blogging couple and then also buy their silence on the way out.