eBay pays $3M fine in blogger harassment case
bbc.com
bbc.com
I always find it interesting that, when people sue other people/companies for some kind of harassment, they have to claim something like this. Shouldn’t it be obvious? Like, they got weird stuff by mail and got stalked. That should be enough? What if they didn’t actually got scared, what if they laughed at it? They were still harassed and this shouldn’t matter at all for the process and sentence.
Based on the meaning of the word threat, yes.
Additionally, some civil offenses do come with precomputed statutory damages, but it’s not possible to come up with such a number for every possible scenario. In the case where there isn’t a precomputed number available we fall back to computing a number after the offense happens based on the circumstances at hand.
If the fine is proportional to psychological harm, it punishes the victims who admit to having a thick skin.
If the fine is not proportional to psychological harm, it makes bullying the most sensitive people too cheap.
As an analogy, consider physical harm. We would probably agree that the punishment for slapping someone should be smaller than the punishment for murdering someone. However, what happens if someone is so exceptionally fragile that if someone slaps them, they literally die? What punishment should we apply? If you say "the punishment for murder", the accused will feel that this is unfair. But if you say "the punishment for slapping", then it means that if you know that someone is fragile like this, you can practically murder them for free.
Congratulations, you’ve turned the courts into a contest between theoretical models of what an act is “worth” instead of considering the facts and circumstances at hand.
Although I'm going to say that in the legal sense we might already be handling things this way. I'm sure the judges have considered this in depth.
No, it starts with the facts and circumstances and then lenses them through the law.
> should be quite exceptional for a crime to depend on the victim's mental state
It is. Emotional damage per se being remediable in law is mostly a myth. This is why we default to actual damages; it largely sidesteps alternate timelines and the unknowable mens rea.
If they don't have different models of what happens, the case usually won't make it to the court.
Litigators will frequently bring up contrasting legal theories. But you’re not allowed to go into hypotheticals when calculating damages.
What case are you citing? Because this rings truer for popular misconception of how law and equity work.
If someone found a small, legal "act committed = no fine" way to victimize someone to the point of suicide, do you think it should be left unpunished ?
Justice MUST be subjective.
Absolutely not. It should be punished. But if two people do the same thing to someone else, that must result in same damages.
>Justice MUST be subjective.
This is abhorrent.
The first one asked for them, the second one didn't.
The question is:
If there are people 1 and 2, without any other information (like motive) available to us, who send spiders to a and b respectively without anything else being done wrong, a and b should receive same compensation and 1 and 2 the same punishment.
If courts can prove that say 2 knew that b was allergic to these spiders and sent them anyways, that's no longer about sending spiders but causing potential bodily harm.
This doctrine is used nowadays in many places already, ie trying to do something even if you don't succeed is criminal in many cases.
IANAL, but I suspect that claims along the lines that it didn't bother them, they found it amusing, etc would result in a much lower, if any, assessment of damages.
> Baugh and his associates also installed a GPS tracking device on the couple's car and created posts on the website Craigslist inviting sexual encounters at their home, according to the filings.
Dunno, emotionally, psychologically, and physically terrorized doesn't seem like a ludicrous way to describe that.
The stalking is self evident. The bugs in a box thing is immature, but unlikely someone can get damages on per se.
Note in the California law, it can be less than intentional (meaning, wanted and intended for the distress to happen) and can be as low as recklessly did something that they should have known would have caused distress, a lower bar than “intentional” for this particular element.
https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/1600/1600...
2020: eBay execs sent roaches and “bloody pig mask” to harass journalists, feds say (arstechnica.com) favorite https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23532888
2022: Former eBay exec who ran scheme to harass Natick couple sentenced to 57 months https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33021937
Complaint is pretty damning (if true): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.236...
Page 5, paragraph 12: <<Defendant Wymer’s employment was terminated by eBay, and Chief Executive Officer Defendant Wenig departed eBay with a $57 million severance package.>> Yikes.
If the defendants lose, do you have any idea how large the settlement might be?
Did you mean: s/defendants/victims/ ?
If yes: Are you saying that the defendants are likely to lose so they will try to settle? If yes, I am still very curious about the amount! The stuff in the filing was so incredibly egregious. Plus the CEO got a 57M USD golden parachute. I could imagine a 20M+ USD settlement.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-28/paul-mor...
I'm no D.A. but isn't this the spot where the prosecutor offers Baugh a reduced sentence in return for testifying against Wenig?
The submitted title ("Executives at eBay sent live spiders and cockroaches to critical bloggers") broke that rule badly.
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
> After today's announcement, we remain determined to push for answers and do whatever we possibly can to ensure that no corporation ever feels that the option exists for them to squash a person's First Amendment rights ... Judge William G. Young, with nearly four decades on the federal bench, told the defendant, "This is one of the most important cases upon which this Court has ever sat. This out-of-control group of which you were a central part is, if not stopped now and stopped completely, an extraordinary danger to our country. Make no doubt about it, the skills that you employed to go cyberstalking are an extreme danger, and when you put those skills to service of some large corporate entity with economic power to go after individuals and squash down their speech, we are all at risk. All of us."
Documentary premieres at SXSW, March 2024 in Austin, TX, one year before the trial date for the civil lawsuit, https://variety.com/2024/film/global/ebay-cyberstalking-docu...
> This film is a jaw-dropping story about one of the most revolutionary companies in Silicon Valley. One of our goals was to understand how did these events happen in the first place and what is a corporation’s moral responsibility when things go wrong.
U.S. Department of Justice resources for cyberbullying and cyberstalking, https://www.ojp.gov/feature/internet-safety/cyberbullying-an...
But the article states: "The employees in question were fired by eBay shortly after the incident."
[CEO] Executive 1 texted Executive 2: "Ina is out with a hot piece on the litigation. If we are ever going to take her down..now is the time."
... Baugh asked [CCO] Executive 2 by message, "If I can neutralize Ina's website in two weeks or less, does that work for you?" Within minutes, Executive 2 responded: "I want to see ashes. As long as it takes. Whatever it takes."
... Hi [Executive 2] - this is Jim Baugh's personal cell. My team ran an Op on our friend in Boston. Nothing illegal occurred and we were actually intending to team up with her and get her on our side in a positive manner. However, small town police got a couple of rental car plates and tracked it back to my people and the hotel the were staying at. They sent a note to ebay investigations GAP team who then passed it to legal and they are conducting an internal investigation on us. We are cooperating, but I know they realize something is off. We will continue to cooperate, but not sure how much longer we can keep this up. If there is any way to get some top cover that would be great. If not, I just wanted you to have a heads up because they are aware that multiple members of the ELT are not a fan of that website to include ___ and his wife. Again, no crime was committed and local police don't have a case. I don't want our legal team to give them one. Let me know if you want to discuss this weekend.
... The Individual Defendants took steps to conceal their harassment campaign from eBay investigators and state and federal authorities, by, among other things, using non-eBay electronic communications platforms, billing expenses related to the campaign to an outside contractor, monitoring law enforcement communications, forging records, lying to investigators, and destroying evidence.Amazon is 2nd
eBay is third
In our city there's a flea market in a bad part of town where the parking lot has a metal sliding gate and there's barbed wire on the roof and all the windows have bars (obviously, given the rest of that) and there are live vendors in there hawking their goods at folding tables, with about the proportion (... high) of stolen and counterfeit goods you'd expect.
That's Amazon. Ebay's like an ordinary, mediocre antique mall. You might buy something that's crap or was misrepresented, or you might overpay, but it's not an entire business basically dedicated to crime.
I'm an ebay seller and I'd never send someone spiders, unless, they paid for them.
I actually like spiders as long as they are smaller than my palm (and nontoxic of course)
Insane story though - what did they think would happen
In all seriousness these dudes thought they were the internet resale mafia and I've very much been enjoying reading how every piece of their plan blew up in their faces. They thought they were so damn slick. There's internet harassment and then there's sending a couple a book on how to deal with a spouse dying. Glad to see they're looking at jail time.
eBay is now worth $22b market cap, as high as $52b in recent times.
AMZN is now $1.5t, about double since the period of time in question, or about 14 - 34 eBays
(editted out a large portion of what I originally wrote about how many eBays of market cap AMZN has been gaining because I was off by a year in my window of time).
(nothing wrong with the content, it's a good trade rag but c'mon, you gotta be thinking about it day and night to sign off on a plan to go through with what was done against that)
Business models can be changed/improved. eBay has been quite stagnant.
If true, I wonder what else eBay's CEO was hoping for.
I keep being impressed by ai's ability to perform research for you. "Found" the answer here:
I wonder if the sources it lists are completely authoritative to its answer (i.e. the answer adds no new/hallucinated stuff that's not in the sources), or whether the sources are just "relevant".
I love that it gives you a good summary of the source and links to it. It’s my replacement for trad search engines now.
Also, life mirrors fiction: https://xkcd.com/325/
We accept that “A” comes before “B” so therefore “A” is better. “A-“ is smaller than “A” therefore “A-“ must be better!
rank = [A- A A+ B- B B+ C- …]Here's your mistake. Alphabet ordering is decreasing in value.
We value things highly by assigning them symbols with low values, so a symbol with a postfix modifier that gives it a slightly lower value means we value it higher! Or something :)
- bronze-silver-gold-platinum-diamond[1]
- Military patches get more ornate with increased rank
- etc.
Its a nice theory but it doesn't really follow.
[1] Tangential, but I have particular annoyance with how game deal with sub-ranks. Some games indicate the highest tier within a rank with the highest number, whereas others use the lowest number.
https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_007.htm
Spiders and poisonous insects aren't allowed though, except scorpions under certain conditions.
Ebay is massive site here, the Beeb should have this as a front page news story.
This is so wrong on so many levels. First, what kind of shitty human being would do something like this in the first place? I mean, no, seriously??? HOW does anybody think that doing shit like this is OK? There is, like, no universe in existence (even if you believe in infinite parallel realities or whatever) where it's OK to mail people dead pigs and send them funeral wreathes, just because you don't like their freaking NEWSLETTER.
And then beyond that, even among the (hopefully small) subset of people who have no moral qualms about this, who the hell could be stupid enough to think that they could do this and NOT get nailed for it, either by being fired by their employer, or getting in legal trouble?
Everything about this just screams out to me as one more reason to embrace misanthropy. :-(
> The eBay stalking scandal was a campaign conducted in 2019 by eBay and contractors. The scandal involved the aggressive stalking and harassment of two e-commerce bloggers, Ina and David Steiner, who wrote frequent commentary about eBay on their website EcommerceBytes. Seven eBay employees pleaded guilty to charges involving criminal conspiracies. The seven employees included two senior members of eBay’s corporate security team.
But It Now or Best offer.
If someone I knew claimed that eBay execs were sending them things like this I wouldn’t believe them. It’s like something from a TV show.
The question isn't "can you send live animals" the question is "what happens if I sent a live/dead animal and _don't_ tell USPS". That question is not answered by the section (?) 526 rules [1].
> The following factors are applied to all shipments of mailable live or dead animals:
> … Protection of the mail and the environment against the following: … Obnoxious odors and noise.
> ...protection of animal specimens against spoilage
https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_003.htm
There's some other restrictions on mailing dead wild animals, but mailing livestock carcasses is not restricted from what I can see outside of those broad guidelines.
Few better ways to spoil a pathologist's morning than a package with a blood stain in one corner.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/25-years-ago-in-virginia-a-very...
Lets do a different example. Lets say I go to checkout at a grocery store and I ring up a bar of soap as a bag of ice. Obviously this is wrong. Nobody is debating you can buy soap at the store but to claim it is ice is wrong.
Back to USPS. Nobody is claiming you can't send live animals. The question is what happens when you send a live animal and don't claim it.
There's no need to declare anything in that case. Might need to declare the preservation chemicals, but nothing about the actual dead animal.
(over the years, I've come to enjoy snail-quariums a lot. They outlive all the fish and keep the walls clean of algae)
Wonder no more: https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm
(I've mailed bee nucs to my local post office, it's usually uneventful, once a newer employee was a little nervous having it around)
Even in the most generous interpretations of the saying, this is a uniquely extraordinary exception to it.
Anyone who has had weird stuff happening to them like finding a GPS tracker on their car among other weird stuff would end up going down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole about 'targeted individuals' or similar. It is extremely distressing.
This is some weird 1950's mob loan shark tactics.
How long have you hung around with sales and marketing folks?
Most of them are reasonable, but in a role where you rapidly switch companies and are comped heavily on closed sales... the outliers are really out there.