Inside eBay’s bizarre campaign against a blog critic

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Inexcusable. Sad. Horrible.<p>The two questions in my mind are:<p>First, how could something this horrible happen at such a high level at such a prominent company? I mean, eBay is not some rinky-dinky business run by fly-by-night operators in a shady part of town. We&#x27;re talking about a well-known publicly traded company that is a component of the S&amp;P 500 with a market capitalization in the tens of billions of dollars. Auntie Tilly would be delighted to hear her niece got a job offer at eBay after college.<p>Second, is this kind of horrendous antisocial behavior (&quot;we can do whatever we want this side of legal with impunity&quot;) <i>representative</i> of behavioral patterns at the higher levels of large, prominent, powerful companies? Or is eBay just an exception, the proverbial bad apple in a basket of mostly good apples? I would hope it&#x27;s the latter.

What amazed me most from the FBI affidavit[0] was the sheer arrogance of these people. Baugh seriously thought he could make up some story on the spot to explain eBay employees being on the opposite side of the country and the police would just drop it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scribd.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;465728291&#x2F;FBI-Affidavit-against-eBay-employees-for-harassment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scribd.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;465728291&#x2F;FBI-Affidavit-agai...</a>

Here&#x27;s a non-paywalled version:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liber.post-gazette.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;nation&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;15&#x2F;eBay-employees-cyberstalking-charges-threats-Devin-Wenig-spiders-cockroaches-pig-mask-Massachusetts&#x2F;stories&#x2F;202006150100" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liber.post-gazette.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;nation&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;15&#x2F;eBay-e...</a><p>Just insane.

Every part of this is wrong.<p>What happened to the targets was appalling. But why why why why do people believe the utter fiction that these companies put out after this happened?<p>If you are the Board, what the hell are you doing here? This guy was clearly not on the level, why didn&#x27;t this come up? And why is anyone getting paid near $100m to manage EBay into the ground. As an investor, this makes no sense. The issue is that you have this perpetual circle of utter incompetent human beings on Board spending other people&#x27;s money.<p>And if you are the CEO, it doesn&#x27;t matter if you knew it about or not. He is quite clearly lying but what is most amazing here is that his lie doesn&#x27;t even explain the behaviour. If you are the CEO, THIS IS YOUR JOB! Take responsibility. Also, he quite clearly was directly responsible for this. You have to be an utter degenerate to know the police have texts of you saying to take someone down, and then tell the media it was nothing to do with you.<p>This is why I truly despair as an investor though. You are surrounded by people who are utterly and totally incompetent. Boards aren&#x27;t up to it. Executives aren&#x27;t up to it. And I am trusting my reputation on them. This is like having to ride a donkey in the Kentucky Derby.<p>(And btw, the EBay Board is apparently &quot;stacked&quot;. Omiydar, the ex-CEO of Bain is Chairman, VC&#x2F;founders, CEO of Lyft, former Chairman of NBC, CEO of Intel...all people who have mostly made their living acting as agents rather than principals...btw, the head of the Compensation Committee was the guy who is known only for driving Gap into the ground...something of an expert in failure then).

This story is so wild, imagine being this couple and trying to tell the police ebay execs are harassing me because I wrote mean things about them on the internet. This is a widespread thing that&#x27;s going on in our culture right now, organized bullying and targetted harassment by those in power and it&#x27;s having devastating consequences on the public discourse. This case is unique because the overconfidence and carelessness of the execs led to them being caught but in most cases people aren&#x27;t reckless enough to leave easily tracked evidence of their misdeeds.<p>I can think of multiple examples of agriculture&#x2F;pharma companies and game publishers engaging in this type of retaliatory harassment, most cases they&#x27;re not careless enough to get caught.

There have been other cases like this, right? I can&#x27;t think of them right now but powerful people get obsessed with anonymous message board commenters and then go on a rampage. Musk has called people at home and where they work. Back in the day Yahoo message board posters used to drive companies crazy. It&#x27;s a weird phenomenon because literally the only people who care are the executives themselves. Nobody else, not even their spouses or competitors, cares. I&#x27;ll call it Fishbowl Syndrome because the executives think they&#x27;re in a fishbowl under constant scrutiny and literally nobody else cares what&#x27;s going on with the fish.

Easily one of the most bizarre stories of corporate malfeasance I&#x27;ve ever heard about. The blog&#x2F;newsletter in question is likely the top in its niche, but it wasn&#x27;t even in the top 200,000 of sites ranked by SimilarWeb – the WSJ, which according to the affidavit the executive mused as being the next of their targets – is ranked in the top 900.<p>In fact, most of this blog&#x27;s coverage was linking to and discussing eBay-related stories from mainstream press like the WSJ. The pure malice of the alleged actions is unfathomable, but how did these senior managers and contractors have the time to even give a shit?

What was this couple writing about Ebay that made the execs so angry that they would risk committing crime? I would imagine a company the size of Ebay has many people writing bad things about it. What was different in this case? I have been searching but cant find anything. I found the news letter was called EcommerceBytes.

Previous discussion:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23529035" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23529035</a>

The character &quot;Hoover&quot; in HBO&#x27;s silicon valley is not extremely far off the mark, as a parody of ex-law-enforcement&#x2F;intelligence types who end up working for big corporate america.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XY2A3c3-lUY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XY2A3c3-lUY</a>

Disgusting. Never shopping from eBay again, though I can’t remember the last time I did if I’m being honest.<p>How do current employees feel about this?

I just finished reading and all I can say is kudos to NPD ( polite, professional and effective ). It still speaks volumes about the arrogance od the executives since it is clear that they thought it could have easily become &#x27; we dont know; we cant track em&#x27;.

From the bottom up in an organization you only see the Peter Principle at work. From top down you realize this is just a matter of perspective because from the top you witness an additional layer of narcissism and then piramide is called the Gervais principle. This is actually the default mode many companies end up in.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blas.com&#x2F;the-gervais-principle&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blas.com&#x2F;the-gervais-principle&#x2F;</a>

I’m reminding of the “stay-behind” teams from the Cold War.<p>NATO was afraid of a Soviet invasion. They knew in a ground war, the Soviets would take several countries.<p>So countries created “stay-behind” teams to coordinate resistance in the aftermath of an occupation.<p>The problem is these teams had nothing to do. So they “made themselves busy” by bothering domestic groups they thought were pro-communist.<p>It was a big problem in Italy.<p>These guys have titles like “Director of Global Resilience.” Their job is to keep operations up and running in a catastrophe.<p>But there was no catastrophe (yet). So they kept themselves busy.

Tangential-ish to the story, but if in reaction someone wanst tp boycott ebay, where would one sell small, one-off lots? Old hardware, used books, etc? Facebook is a no-go. Gumtree is owned by ebay. Amazon is also a nasty company.<p>I&#x27;m in the uk, so no craigslist.

Is there still any overlap between PayPal and eBay? We often hear stories about PayPal’s toxic behavior. Maybe PayPal’s and eBay’s toxic culture is shared.

Anyone know how they got deleted and decrypted WhatsApp chat messages between the individual?? I thought WhatsApp was end to end encrypted? iCloud backups?

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Stories like this makes me wonder if episodes such as this one are much more prevalent than we hear.

“director of global resiliency” is one heck of an interesting job title

Yeah this whole thing is playing out really strange.

Is there any non-paywalled variant of this story at another news site?

title is missing [paywall]

This is the fear of many people with mental illness: gangstalking.

This doesn&#x27;t work.