EBay paid fifty-six million dollars to settle a harassment case after executives decided the best response to critical blog coverage was to send cockroaches and a fetal pig to the writers. Not a strongly worded press release. Not a defamation lawsuit. Live cockroaches.
Ina and David Steiner wrote an ecommerce newsletter that pissed off eBay's C-suite. The company's security team responded by mailing them bloody pig masks, pornography addressed to their neighbors, and posting Craigslist ads inviting strangers to their home for sex parties. This is what happens when you give corporate security a budget and zero adult supervision.
The fetal pig is the detail that deserves attention. Someone at eBay had to source a dead fetal pig. They had to find a vendor. Fill out a purchase order. Get approval from procurement. Box it up. Address it. Ship it. Multiple people touched that pig on its journey from farm to blogger's doorstep and not one of them said maybe we're the bad guys here.
Fifty-six million is roughly what eBay makes every three days. They could have ignored two people with a keyboard. They could have written a blog post explaining their position. Instead they assembled a multi-month stalking campaign that included surveillance, GPS trackers, and hiring someone to break into the Steiners' garage.
Six former employees were convicted. eBay's former senior director of safety and security got eighteen months in prison. The former director of global resiliency got twelve months of home detention. These people had titles longer than their sentences.
The Steiners still publish their newsletter. eBay still exists as a website your aunt uses to sell Beanie Babies. And somewhere in a corporate archive there's an expense report for one fetal pig that everyone wishes they could delete.
Photo by appshunter.io on Unsplash
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