alt Hacker News'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout
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I assume this has been investigated but it's difficult to believe this stopped at one pair of critics. There are plenty of people online critical of eBay. Were they running similar campaigns on anyone else?
> Seven members of eBay’s security team, including former police captains, “worked together to harass and intimidate the Steiners”, according to prosecutors.
I hope someone's looking into the careers of the "former police captains" here. Again, difficult to believe they just woke up one day and decided to fly cross-country to vandalize someone's house with no prior history of intimidation.
Side note but did anyone here tried to sell stuff on eBay ?
Their pricing are insane, they take a cut on your product price, but also on the delivery method and even on the taxes !
It amounts to about 13% of total price, including delivery and taxes.
It looks absolutely insane to me, but some people seem to defend it.
To put some perspective, here in France we have an extremely profitable competitor called Leboncoin, it's crushing eBay shares in the country, and they take only 5% cut on the product price.
Scott Adams [0], who recently passed away, had a great line on human behavior (paraphrased):
Whenever people are unsupervised and there is a chance for fraud or bad behavior and, due to the lack of supervision, they believe they won't be caught, you should ALWAYS assume that people will behave badly.
For another example, the Google case where it was exposed how many nefarious activities they were up to around auction bidding.
Good to know I can buy FT Digital Edition for undefined per month to read this article.
I just can't fathom how employees of a company would do all this because someone with a newsletter criticized the company often.
I understand employees committing fraud for their own gain. I don't understand Directors and analysts doing this to someone, especially when senior execs weren't charged. Seems like there were a lot of cover ups going on.
There've been a few recent submissions of this story over the past week or so, but none with significant discussion.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49079244> (6 comments) had the most activity.
So no, this wouldn't count as a dupe.
it's difficult to believ that this was there first time doing this
[flagged]
Brian Gilbert, 56, of San Jose, Calif., former Senior Manager of Special Operations for eBay’s Global Security Team, was sentenced to time served, one year of supervised release with the special condition that he have no contact with either of the victims in the case and a $20,000 fine
Jim Baugh, 47, of San Jose, Calif., eBay’s former Senior Director of Safety and Security, was sentenced to 57 months in prison
David Harville, 50, of Las Vegas, Nev., former Director of Global Resiliency, was sentenced to 24 months in prison
Stephanie Popp, 34, of Louisville, Ky., former Senior Manager of Global Intelligence, was sentenced to 12 months in prison
Philip Cooke, 56, of San Jose, Calif., a former Senior Manager of Security Operations, was sentenced to 18 months in prison and 12 months of home confinement
Stephanie Stockwell, 28, of Redwood City, Calif., a former Manager of Global Intelligence, was sentenced to one year in home confinement
Veronica Zea, 28, of San Jose, Calif., a contract intelligence analyst, was sentenced to one year in home confinement
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/final-defendant-ebay-cybe...