--- title: "eBay pays $56m to the couple its security staff terrorised" description: "eBay staff stalked a newsletter couple with live insects, a funeral wreath and threats. Seven were sentenced; the civil case settled for a reported $56m." dek: "A husband and wife who published a small newsletter about online selling were sent live insects, a funeral wreath and a bloody pig mask by employees of one of the companies they covered. Seven people were sentenced; the company has now settled." published_at: "2026-08-05T04:57:33.695Z" updated_at: "2026-08-05T04:57:33.695Z" tags: - "Business" - "Security" - "Policy" source_url: "https://www.ft.com/content/06ec1b03-d4af-40cf-b12a-4ba5a410f6d2" source_domain: "ft.com" canonical: "https://hex37.com/ebay-pays-56m-couple-security-staff-terrorised" --- The deliveries began in August 2019. A box of live cockroaches. A funeral wreath. A bloody pig mask of the kind sold for Halloween. A book about surviving the death of a spouse. Pornographic magazines addressed to a neighbour but printed with the name of the man who lived down the street. Then anonymous messages online, menacing enough that the couple inside the house started watching who drove past it. The targets were David and Ina Steiner, a middle-aged pair living in Natick, a suburb west of Boston. They published a small trade newsletter called EcommerceBytes, read by people who make their living selling things on the internet — the sort of publication that tracks fee increases, site outages and rule changes that matter enormously to a few hundred thousand small traders and not at all to anyone else. It had no investors and no newsroom. It had a comments section that was often unkind about eBay. The people sending the packages worked for eBay. Not rogue contractors at three removes, but the company's own security department, run out of its headquarters in San Jose, California — a group that included former police officers, and whose job title was, in effect, keeping eBay safe. ## A newsletter critic became a surveillance target What prosecutors described was not a prank that escalated. It was a plan with logistics. Members of the team set up burner social media accounts to send the Steiners threatening messages, then offered to help the couple find out who was behind the harassment — a manoeuvre designed to make eBay look like a friend rather than the source. Others flew across the country to Massachusetts and surveilled the house in person, intending to fix a GPS tracking device to the Steiners' car. The trigger was ordinary press criticism. The Steiners had written about litigation involving eBay and had run coverage the company's leadership found irritating. Court filings quote a message from eBay's then communications chief, Steve Wymer, saying the company was going to "crush this lady" — the lady being Ina Steiner — and a text from then chief executive Devin Wenig about taking her down. Both men left eBay. Neither was charged with a crime, and both have denied authorising or knowing about the harassment campaign. ## Seven prosecutions, and a ceiling on who was blamed Seven people from eBay's security operation were prosecuted for cyberstalking and witness tampering — the second charge because members of the group also misled police in Natick who were trying to work out where the packages came from. Jim Baugh, eBay's former senior director of safety and security, received 57 months in prison. David Harville, former director of global resiliency, got 24 months. Philip Cooke, a former senior manager of security operations, received 18 months plus 12 months of home detention. Stephanie Popp, a former senior manager of global intelligence, got 12 months. Brian Gilbert, a former senior manager of special operations, was sentenced to time served, a year of supervision, a $20,000 fine and an order never to contact the victims again. Two further employees were also sentenced. eBay as a company paid a $3m criminal penalty — described by prosecutors as the maximum available for the offences involved. For a business turning over more than $10bn a year, that is roughly the cost of a modest marketing campaign. The civil case was the part that remained open. The Steiners sued eBay, its executives and the security staff, arguing the company itself bore responsibility for what its employees did on its time and in pursuit of its interests. That case has now been settled, with the payout [reported at $56m](https://www.ft.com/content/06ec1b03-d4af-40cf-b12a-4ba5a410f6d2). It is close to twenty times the criminal fine, and it is money the company agreed to pay rather than keep arguing in front of a jury about how far up the building the knowledge went. ## Corporate security has police tools without police oversight The uncomfortable part of this story is structural rather than personal. Large companies increasingly run internal security and intelligence functions staffed by former law enforcement officers, equipped with surveillance tools, and pointed at whatever the company decides constitutes a threat. Those functions sit outside the accountability that applied to the same people in their previous careers. There is no warrant requirement, no judicial supervision, no complaints commissioner. There is a manager, an objective and a budget. In eBay's case the objective was a newsletter. The team's own internal framing, according to the criminal filings, treated hostile coverage as something to be neutralised — and the tools they reached for were the tools of a police operation conducted against private citizens with no legal basis whatsoever. ## The questions a settlement does not close Two things remain unresolved. The first is whether the Steiners were the only targets. eBay had no shortage of loud critics, and it is hard to believe that a department capable of planning a cross-country intimidation trip did so exactly once, against one household. Nothing in the public record establishes other victims, but nothing rules them out either. The second is the gap between the sentences and the org chart. The people who flew to Boston and ordered the insects went to prison. The executives whose messages prosecutors quoted did not face charges. A settlement paid by the company closes the ledger without ever resolving the question that made the case notorious in the first place: how an instruction to crush a critic travelled from a text message into a stranger's driveway, and how many people along the way treated it as a normal thing to be asked to do.