eBay's bug-mailing scandal finally costs them nearly $50 million

Back in 2019, a Massachusetts couple named David and Ina Steiner ran a small e-commerce newsletter that eBay's leadership apparently found a little too critical for comfort. Instead of, you know, emailing a rebuttal or ignoring it like a normal company, former eBay employees allegedly launched a full-blown intimidation campaign against them — live cockroaches, spiders, a funeral wreath, a bloody pig Halloween mask, and even planning to slap a GPS tracker on their car, according to reporting on the case. This is corporate crisis management by way of a horror movie.

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eBay agrees to pay $50M to blogging couple who they mailed cockroaches, spiders, and a bloody pig mask, to intimidate them out of publishing critical articles

The goal, prosecutors said, was simple: scare a couple of bloggers into shutting up. It did not work. In 2020, federal prosecutors charged 7 former eBay employees over the coordinated harassment campaign, and most of them pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy and cyberstalking, landing prison time or home confinement. Now the financial reckoning has landed too — eBay is on the hook for nearly $50 million in a settlement with the Steiners, reportedly $46.15 million from the company itself, with additional chunks coming out of the pockets of former CEO Devin Wenig and other ex-executives personally.

Read that lineup again: the actual former CEO of a Fortune 500 company writing a personal check because his people allegedly mailed a pig mask to a married couple's house. That's not a PR crisis, that's a plot point. And the internet reacted about how you'd expect — with total disbelief that this was ever the strategy eBay's brass landed on.

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Bold strategy eBay t.co/h7wqul6ndN

The absurdity is the whole point. eBay had every normal corporate tool available — legal threats, PR spin, just plain ignoring a small newsletter — and instead reportedly greenlit a campaign that reads like a rejected Coen Brothers script. It's the kind of story that gets funnier and more insane the more you learn, and now it's got a nine-figure price tag attached to prove it actually happened.

The Steiners get paid, the disgraced executives get to explain themselves to friends and family for the rest of their lives, and eBay gets to be the answer to a trivia question nobody wants to be the answer to: which company mailed a family a bloody pig mask over a blog post. Nearly $50 million later, that's the legacy.