The filings said the couple had been left "emotionally, psychologically, and physically" terrorised.
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.
The crux is that all crimes have a list of elements which must be proven before the whole thing is a crime, or tort. Breaking this one down hypothetically using California’s Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress law, the plaintiff must prove that someone did something outrageous, that the defendant intended to cause emotional distress, that there was emotional distress, and that the emotional distress was from the defendants actions. So each of those individual things must be alleged, and proven with evidence. This is why they always allege things like being terrorized rather than not stating the obvious, because they wouldn’t be successful because they didn’t meet all the elements of the crime, or tort.
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.
I don't think that they were confused or in denial about whether it was necessary for purposes of a legal requirement. It seems that they were agnostic on that, and saying that it would be better if the law itself didn't require that emotional distress be asserted and proven.
Forensic psychology is a weird discipline that evolved more from legal precedents than social science research. There are standards for what counts as victimization, and incentives to categorize negative emotional responses as e.g. recurring episodes rather than chronic or permanent problems. Those legally-defined turns of phrase are like pinball bumpers that they have to hit to activate different levels of compensation.
(IANAL) The amount you win in a lawsuit has to be based on actual damages so if you want to sue for emotional distress it has to fit the legal definition which depends on the jurisdiction. Since emotional distress isn't bound to any hospital bills or other quantifiable harm, it generally pays quite a bit more.
Also with any lawsuit you aim high and meet somewhere in the middle. Even if eBay won’t be liable for damages they may just settle this outside of court to get rid of it.
Sound to me like they're talking (their) philosophy rather than existing law. I for one agree, harassment shouldn't be considered lesser just because the victim admits to having a thick skin.
There’s a few things going on here. In a civil case, we are concerned with righting a wrong as much as we are with deterring future bad behavior. To attempt to undo damage, you need to know how much damage was done.
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.
> Damages shouldn't be subjective but based on the acts committed
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.
Are you saying that as aggreement or disagreement? The court is already to settle dueling theoretical models, and it will still settle them by considering facts and circumstances. It should be quite exceptional for a crime to depend on the victim's mental state since someone who spends years learning how to accept the world as it is shouldn't be legally penalised.
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.
> court is already to settle dueling theoretical models, and it will still settle them by considering facts and circumstances
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.
Are you European by any chance? In the English speaking world, courts are typically adversarial and work by two competing interpretations (a prosecution/plaintiff and a defence/respondent) being fit to what happened.
If they don't have different models of what happens, the case usually won't make it to the court.
No. Think forward and imagine you escalate on the threat, by punching your interlocutor. Your act is the same in both cases, but the physical injury to Mike Tyson will likely be minimal whereas that inflicted upon the child would be significant, perhaps even severe. To say they were the same would be like considering two similar mathematical operations to be equivalent without considering the quantities involved.
If I showed my fist to Mike Tyson, he's pretty likely to guess that I would fail miserably if I tried to follow through, and I'd be the one who ended up getting punched...and he'd be right. It's not crazy for the legal system to take that into account.
You're very wrong ! The suffering of the victim matters more than the ability of the culprit to act within a certain legal budget.
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 ?
>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 ?
Absolutely not. It should be punished. But if two people do the same thing to someone else, that must result in same damages.
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.
> The acts of intimidation included sending live insects, a foetal pig and a funeral wreath to the Steiners' home in Natick, Massachusetts.
> 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.
I imagine it's a necessary component to assessing damages. Aside from the criminal component, the claim of inflicted pain/suffering is necessary if they want to seek damages.
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.
Whether it should or not is a matter of opinion, but the law makes a distinction based on the state of motives of the perpetrator, and the consequences of their actions. Murder has a more severe punishment than attempted murder, and premeditated murder has a more severe punishment than spur-of-the-moment murder.
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?
> But maybe not if the defendants are out for blood more than money.
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.
> Baugh's lawyers said he faced pressure from former eBay CEO Devin Wenig to reign in the Steiners over their coverage of the company.
Mr Wenig, who stepped down in 2019, has not been charged in the case and denies knowledge of the harassment campaign.
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?
Wenig maybe made a "counter offer" to Baugh of some sort? With such people, you never know. Maybe a horse head or some other refreshing token of appreciation.
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."
> 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.
[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.
I trust them more than Amazon. I don't trust them much, but... like, a lot more than Amazon.
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 know exactly the type of flea market and antique mall you're talking about, and that's the best analogy for current-Amazon and always-eBay I've heard. Ha!
I feel like all the articles are ignoring the important question: what kind of spiders? Obviously the roaches are dubias. Just hand those off to an employee at the nearest pet store and they'll be pleased as punch. What kind of spiders though? Cobweb spiders, jumping spiders, tarantulas? These are all very different situations. Heck, there's tarantulas that go for 100s of dollars. This could have been a thoughtful gift gone wrong.
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 was distracted trying to destroy a newsletter and AMZN ended up growing by many eBays.
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).
This is meaningless. A few employees did this. Companies are composed of people. The whole company wasn't busy being distracted. They just had a worse business model.
A few employees... starting in the C-suite focused on a critic with a newsletter that looks like this: https://www.ecommercebytes.com
(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.
The CEO and CCO were personally involved, as well as a whole coterie of Senior-level directors. Calling this a "few employees" is completely disingenuous.
Having seen the universalhub.com reporting on this over the years, it's frustrating to still see headlines like "...live spiders and cockroaches...", which grossly understate it (e.g., repeated death threats, and physical stalking by a team they flew out).
Ah, answering my own question in case others are interested. Seems the bloggers were being followed by a van at one point and they were able to get the plates, which ultimately linked back to ebay.
I keep being impressed by ai's ability to perform research for you. "Found" the answer here:
First time I hear of "phind", nice that it shows the sources on one side, and the summary/answer on the other.
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 wouldn’t say the sources are 100% authoritative but in my experience the answers are basically what the sources say - haven’t experienced hallucinations on phind after months of daily use. Depending on the case it is still good to confirm with the source.
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.
eBay cooperated fully with the investigation and had no interest in protecting the ones who were caught. Maybe none of them, iunno the eBay office culture at all.
I think it's highly more likely that eBay executives had an agreed upon story and fall guy. The other option is they are so phenomenally stupid that they hired a group of people who thought it was OK to fly across the country to stalk people.
To this day I cannot accept that A+ is better than A-. Clearly the ordering is increasing in value with each letter and so a smaller value is better, and “-“ / minus gives you a slightly smaller value.
We accept that “A” comes before “B” so therefore “A” is better. “A-“ is smaller than “A” therefore “A-“ must be better!
I remember reading a funny eBay user feedback (of a seller, not of me :) that said something like: "F+++++++++ This seller is a scammer." Like you, the user felt that the many plus signs would make the F stronger, i.e. more negative.
Yes you are right but I think you’ve found a bug with my cack handed description of my logic, not with the logic itself!
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 :)
- 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.
Ah so what you’re saying is a - should represent moving the score toward the start of the alphabet (the 1st letter) and a + should represent moving toward the end of the alphabet (the 26th letter)
Looks like the execs didn't get prosecuted and it all fell to low level employees. Not really justice if the people that are still in those positions are still free.
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. :-(
When you know that you'll get fired with a 42 million severance package, maybe you indulge in a lot of crazy shit. Reading about the whole thing, I feel like drugs and or mental issues were involved.
> 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.
I wonder where the execs got hold of those things. Did they buy it on eBay and have it shipped from a seller? Or did they go and put a dead pig in a box themselves? Messed up either way, and good that an end was put to their harassment of the bloggers.
The Edmund Scientific catalog used to sell all of the things on the list, so it was probably there (are they still in business?), or somewhere similar.
Back when people used to say "there's no such thing as bad publicity" the internet hadn't been invented and there was little notion of the yet-unnamed Streisand Effect.
Even in the most generous interpretations of the saying, this is a uniquely extraordinary exception to it.
I wonder what the rules on sending live specimens through the post are. Knowingly not using the right markings on the package can cause issues. When they ask you if you have any of "these" things in the package and you then say no would be a federal crime. Messing with the postal inspectors tends to be wildly underappreciated at the repercussions they can inflict.
Context for fellow leaders; nuc is short for nucleus and is basically a small colony or a place a small colony might live. It is not short for bee nunchucks as I had assumed
I bought a small box aquarium and the snail in it died. I wrote to the company and they replied by mailing me a snail in a bag. IIRC, it was clearly labelled "live 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)
I think you guys are missing the actually comment.
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].
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.
I believe the Hot Zone (though maybe not the Reston incident it was based on?) starts off with leaking deceased monkey remains arriving at a pathology lab.
Few better ways to spoil a pathologist's morning than a package with a blood stain in one corner.
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.
That's what couriers are for. I'm sure eBay knows which ones are the most reliable. And lying to them is just a breach of contract (but they can open more stuff willy nilly).
Also, let's not forget - let's not forget, Dude - that keeping wildlife, an amphibious rodent, for uh, domestic, you know, within the city - that aint legal either.
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.
I want to know if the execs were putting the roaches into a package themselves in their mahogany offices or if they paid someone to do it... CaaS maybe? (Cockroaches as a Service)
I think this trivializes the experience. They wouldn't have known who was behind it initially and must have thought they were targeted by the government.
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.
Surely you grasp that this is why the rich and or powerful (used to?) get away with lots, and why many feel they can do things like this, often with no true consequences.
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.