Episode 91: An Etsy-sode That Is Really An eBay-sode

Welcome to Clotheshorse, the podcast who remembers that the first thing I ever bought on Ebay was a Hello Kitty contact lens case from Japan.

I’m your host, Amanda

This is episode 91…part two in a series about Etsy called the etsysodes…but this episode is really more of an Ebaysode…which doesn’t sound nearly as cute! As I was writing and researching Ebay, I realized that I couldn’t tell the story of Etsy if I didn’t break down the story of Ebay…because not only does Etsy exist thanks to the systems and innovations created by ebay…EBay also invented and normalized the idea of buying stuff from strangers on the internet. Go back in a time machine to say, 1995 and tell your mom that you’re about to order her birthday present from a person on the internet…and see what she has to say!

So today is all about Ebay. I’ll give you the history…the rise and then the…I don’t know, maintain altitude? There’s not a full fall involved. We’ll touch on the dot com bubble of the 90s, and we’ll hear some of the reasons sellers over the years have been angry at Ebay…but stick around because they have no other option for the business and livelihood. For those of you who sell on Etsy, this is probably already sounding a little familiar! To cap it all off, a special guest will join me in the second half of the episode so I can tell them a wild (and recent) story about Ebay involving prank pizzas, slight vandalism, and lots of intrigue. Are you excited? I have to say… I’m pretty excited.

You can’t tell the story of Etsy without talking about Ebay. And that’s not just because they both start with E, end with Y, and have two letters in between….which IS really weird now that I think about it….

But as I mentioned in part one of this series (aka the previous episode) Ebay really gave a lot of people the ability to start a small business without spending a lot of money. You might need some actual inventory to sell, a digital camera (now there’s a blast from the past), and some shipping materials…but you didn’t need a ton of inventory, a cash register, a store lease, employees to work in that store, and so on. You didn’t need to take out a small business loan to start an ebay business. And you didn’t need to build a website or spend money on marketing..

Ebay was born in 1995, just four years after the birth of the internet. And like a lot of legends, Ebay began its life with a different name: Auction Web. Which to be fair, is a pretty accurate definition of what Ebay is, right? No confusion there. Although I still laugh when i hear someone call the internet “the web.” It’s one of my favorite things in old Lifetime movies and episodes of Law and Order. It was created by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar, as part of a larger personal website. One of the first items sold on AuctionWeb was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. Omidyar contacted the winning bidder to ask if he understood that the laser pointer was broken; the buyer said: “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.” The longtime, completely fictional back story of Ebay was that Omidyar had a girlfriend who loved vintage Pez dispensers, and he built the site as a way for her to buy more Pez dispensers. This was totally untrue, Omidyar just wanted to build something that allowed people to trade directly was one another…and that was –at the time–a significantly less sexy story, so he went with the Pez story. It also brought more toy collectors to Ebay!

Ebay soon became the first website to over person-to-person sales. Meaning, you weren’t making the purchase from Ebay…you were making the purchase from another person. Ebay was just the platform. And this was a pretty wild and groundbreaking idea at the time. But…let’s just keep track here, there are a ton of platforms that are part of our day to day live that do just that: poshmark, mercari, vinted, depop, reverb, and of course, ETSY. To say that ebay crawled so etsy could fly….or whatever the saying is…that is 100% true here. Without the technological innovation that made selling stuff to one another easier and safer like online payment, easy shipping, etc….we would not have Etsy (or any of the resale platforms). Furthermore, Ebay normalized the idea of buying stuff from strangers on the internet. In the early days of Ebay, the average person–who probably didn’t have internet access in their home–could not even understand how or why anyone would ever do that.

Ebay was just a hobby for Omidyar UNTIL his internet service provider informed him that his site was getting so much traffic that he would have to upgrade to a more expensive plan…so he decided to start charging for auction listings. The site changed it’s name form AuctionWeb to eBay in1997, named after Echo Bay Technology Group, Omidyar’s consulting firm. The domain name echobay.com was already taken by a gold mining company,he shortened it to eBay.com. In 1997 the company received $6.7 million in funding from the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. That’s a lot of money for a startup…but the late 90s were kind of a wild time, when everyone with money wanted to get involved in internet businesses, young people were begin told to study computers and programming in college, and it really did seem like anyone could make a fortune off of this new thing called the internet.

This created a bubble, an overinflated sense of the scale, profitability, and value of the internet…possibly because relatively few people owned a computer and had regular access to the internet, possibly because technology hadn’t kept up…but when the bubble burst in 2000, lots and lots of people in that industry lost their jobs. Japan even went into a recession, thanks to a lot of money being lost on technology stocks. At that moment–march 2000–ebay was in merger talks with yahoo (another one of the biggest tech companies at the time). That fell apart…but it’s important to keep in mind that Ebay was one of the tech companies that was getting investors all excited about the internet in the first place!

Anyway…Ebay got that $6.7million in investment from a venture capital firm…which if you listened to the last episode, you know that kind of money comes with some serious strings attached…and those strings are exponential growth and profitability. The thing is…it’s thanks to companies like ebay that investors expect that kind of wild money making…because ebay really actually achieved that and set the bar really high.

Meg Whitman was hired by the board as eBay president and CEO in March 1998. At the time, the company had 30 employees,half a million users and revenues of $4.7 million in the United States. During her ten years at Ebay–she left in 2008 and we will definitely be talking about that year a lot as it intersects with Etsy…anyway, during her ten years at ebay, she grew it to more than 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue. And Whitman wasn’t just some rando brought in to take care of business. She had a lot of very impressive experience:

Whitman began her career in 1979 as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble.

She moved around to other companies through the 80s from the Bain and Company to the Walt Disney Company to Stride Rite (the children’s shoe brand) …eventually landing as CEO of FTD (the flower delivery service) in 1995. And in 1997 she moved to Hasbro, where she oversaw Playskool and Mr. Potato Head. But most importantly, she brought the Teletubbies to the United States. Sometimes I relieved to see the Teletubbies mentioned by others because I always worry that the entire concept–and all of the merch associated with Teletubbies was created inside my brain during this one summer in my very early 20s where my boyfriend and I were partying particularly hard.

But back to ebay…

In the beginning Ebay was focused on collectibles, toys, comics, coins, pottery, and vintage clothing. Beanie Babies were actually a major draw and seller on Ebay at the peak of the Beanie Baby Bubble…at some point Ty (the maker of Beanie Babies) had tried to run its own ebay style beanie baby exchange on its site…but it just couldn’t keep up with demand and the site would crash. Beanie Baby maniacs migrated to Ebay. Even today, there are more than 300K beanie baby listings on ebay! But I cannot emphasize enough how much of a big deal Beanie Babies were to the ebay business in its early years. In fact, in 1998 when Ebay went public, in the risk factors section of its annual report that it filed with the SEC that year, Omidyar noted that Ebay’s dependence on the continued strength of the Beanie Babies market was a major risk! Regardless, Omidyar and his first employee Jeffrey Skroll immediately became instant millionaires on the first day of trading, with shares selling at almost triple the target price.

My friends, his is the kind of wild and crazy success story that creates massive tech bubbles!

Under Meg Whitman’s leadership, Ebay became a household name. She had the site rebuilt (it was very shaky and prone to crashing), she created organization around departments and leadership, and she expanded the categories of product that one could buy/sell on the site…to a point where you could find just about anything. In 2000, eBay had 12 million registered users and a cyberinventory of more than 4.5 million items on sale on any given day. In 2001, it had the largest user base of any website. It was at the top of the world!

In the early days of ebay, most purchases were paid for via money order. Every once in a while a seller would accept personal checks but that was rare because of course, people would bounce checks, right? Meaning…write a check that didn’t have enough money in the account to cover it. Then the seller would be out the returned check fee that the bank charged them AND the cost of the item they had just sold. So sellers went with money orders. A buyer would have a week or so from the end of an auction to mail a money order. The seller would ship the order upon receiving the money order. So, the average transaction of purchase to receiving the purchase items would often take anywhere from two weeks to a full month. It was inconvenient for everyone involved.

Enter Paypal, which allowed people to pay online for their purchases! Major game changer! By 2002, 70% of all ebay auctions accepted Paypal payments and roughly 25% of all ebay purchases were made via Paypal. Paypal was making a fortune off of those transaction fees and ebay wanted a piece of that pie. After all, wasn’t paypal basically making money off of all of Ebay’s hard work? So it made perfect sense for Ebay to buy Paypal in 2002 for a cool $1.5 billion.

In 2008, Meg Whitman left Ebay…being replaced by John Donahoe. If that name sounds familiar to you, it’s because Donahoe is now the CEO of Nike. Years later, hedge fund billionaire Carl C. Icahn would call Donahoe “either incompetent or negligent” as he urged Donahoe to spin off Paypal into its own company because he was worried Donahoe was running Paypal into the ground, also saying, “To win a war, you need to have great generals that have proven their competence and loyalty. Unfortunately, it is obvious to us that this is lacking at eBay and PayPal. PayPal must be separated NOW so that great management can be attracted – management that can make the right decision and know when to sell at the right time, not the worst time.” That was six years in the future…and we’ll talk about paypal in a minute…but first, let’s talk about 2008…

We left off in 2008 with the Etsy story in the last episode…and we’ll be picking up there in this episode….but 2008 was a pivotal year for Etsy…and it was also the year that a lot of vintage sellers left Ebay and moved to Etsy.

Sweeping changes happened at Ebay in 2008 with John Donahoe saying that eBay was at a crossroads: “We need to redo our playbook, and we need to do it fast.”

And to be clear….Ebay was coming off of years and years of exponential growth and profitability…yet…that’s never enough. I cannot underscore that enough. As a person who has worked for businesses that are 4 years old, 10 years old, and 40 years old (and other numbers in between), they all had one thing in common: each year’s sales must be bigger and more profitable than the previous year…no matter what. That’s how you end up with progressively wilder and longer black friday sales. That’s how you end up with the quality of clothing getting shoddier and shoddier while the prices we pay as customers stay the same. And that’s how you get workers–whether they work in the stores, the warehouse or the garment factory–getting paid less and less.

EBay couldn’t start putting stuff on sale or cutting back on its store staff…because remember, Ebay didn’t really sell anything . It provided a service. Ebay made the bulk of its money from new listings and sales. So it seemed to them that the best strategy was to entice more customers to come to the site for shopping, more often. They shifted their focus away from the sellers to customer aquicsiton and retention: meaning, more new customers who stick around and buy stuff again and again.

First off—and this one made sellers very unhappy–sellers were no longer able to give buyers feedback. So if a buyer never paid, scammed a seller, etc…the seller couldn’t say anything bad. It went against everything Ebay had stood for since the beginning–mutual trusts between the seller and the buyer. Mutual ratings only reinforced that trust. But over time, especially with the addition of the buy it now feature–ebay was becoming more like a regular online store and less like a flea market. And that mutual trust was dissolving.

According to Ebay, buyers who’d had a bad experience with one seller were less inclined to buy from anyone else on eBay. And that bad experience could include negative feedback from a seller. So while that mutual trust reinforced by the mutual reviews system benefitted sellers…the threat of a customer not coming back to ebay, well, that hurt ebay. After all it was in Ebay’s best interests to host as many transactions as possible, since they got a piece of every transaction. More transactions equaled more profits for Ebay.

Enter Auctionbytes (now called Ecommercebytes) a blog run by Ina and David Steiner. The couple had started the blog back in the early days of Ebay in 1999, and it became a resource for Ebay sellers (and later, Amazon sellers). I’m introducing Auctionbytes now for two reasons: one because they did a survey of seller sentiments in the light of these 2008 changes…and two, because in a little bit, I’m going to tell you a wild story about this blog and Ebay.

Well this survey by Auctionbytes of close to 2000 sellers found that 98.7% said the changes would have a negative effect on their business.

In eBay’s Seller Central forum, a husband-and-wife team selling as manchester689 protested: “We work very hard to maintain a 100% record. But this includes being able to vet or weed out idiots. Now that sellers can no longer leave honest appraisals of buyers means that we can no longer pre-vet buyers.”

Because being able to vet buyers was an important thing for sellers. Many sellers wouldn’t sell to buyers who had poor or minimal feedback. Often sellers required a minimum star rating to even place a bid…if a buyer didn’t have that, then the seller could cancel their bid.

So this was a major blow to ebay sellers. On top of that, ebay increased it’s “final value fee” or FVF, which is the cut ebay takes for each completed sale. But ebay did say, hey, sellers who get the highest satisfaction ratings will get preferential treatment when users search eBay and will get discounts on the “final value fee” (FVF). Many sellers felt this new system would only benefit the biggest sellers, and everyone else would be lost in the shuffle.”

A lot of sellers saw this as Ebay trying to take on Amazon, which was probably at least a little bit of the problem.

Nonetheless more and more sellers left ebay, heading to etsy to sell vintage or off to amazon to sell their brand new stuff.

Over the years, more and more sellers found themselves more and more unhappy. Search “ebay doesn’t protect sellers” and you will find an almost infinite amount of results, many in very emotional all caps!

Sellers have found themselves scammed by buyers thanks to ebay’s mandatory returns. For example, here’s a 2017 story from The Guardian:

“

“Clive Rose* sold two handmade Japanese swords on eBay, worth a total of £1,940. The buyer, once he had received them, demanded that the cost of the more expensive sword be slashed. Rose refused to haggle and asked for the items to be returned and a refund issued.

Eventually a box arrived. “We couldn’t open it until we had signed for it,” says Rose. “On the label it said two items were inside. When we had signed and opened it up we found the cheaper £540 sword badly damaged because of poor packaging, and a brick. The other £1,400 sword, for which he had been trying to barter, was not there.”

The buyer claimed Rose had forfeited his rights by signing for the parcel, while eBay’s response was similar. Although Rose sent photographs and message threads to support his case, eBay took the money from his PayPal account and refunded the buyer for both swords. Rose, who has a 100% satisfaction rating from other buyers, had his account suspended for withholding eBay’s seller fees and is now threatened with debt collectors because his PayPal account is overdrawn.”

Ebay said they were cracking down on this kind of scamming, but Catherine Lewis had a similar story. She sold a coat via the website. The buyer claimed that it never arrived and, because Lewis could only provide proof of postage and not of delivery, eBay forced a refund. “When I looked at the buyers’ feedback other sellers all told the same story,” she says. “The buyer claimed the item didn’t arrive but eBay gave a refund, even on items that were signed for. Worse, the buyer has been reported to eBay three times before for this and no action has been taken. They are free to keep buying items and claiming back the money – essentially stealing – and eBay is not doing anything about it.”

I could tell you these kinds of stories all day. Vintage designer handbags quote returned, but they had magically transformed into dirty forever 21 bags. Turntable returned completely smashed. A lot of sellers thought yes, people were scamming, but also people were coming down with buyer’s remorse and intentionally damaging things so they could claim the item arrived damaged and get their refund.

Sellers also found themselves permanently banned for allegedly charging too much for shipping, not shipping fast enough, or having “too many returns” in an era where about 30-50% of items bought online are returned. I want to say ebay sellers aren’t allowed to exceed 2%. Meanwhilel Ebay promotes the ease and availability of returns. It’s just plain unfair and it destroys the livelihoods of these sellers. This is a good time to remind all of you long time listeners that I’ve had multiple guests on this show who found themselves banned for life from ebay for no clear reason.

I took a trip through the ebay community boards (because of course I did) and I found a seller who was banned after selling on ebay for 18 years due to a higher than allowed return rate. He said, “I believe eBay is trying to be more like Amazon, at the expense of pushing out the kind of sellers that created eBay and offer the items that Amazon does not.”

Let’s put a pin in that idea: the idea that a company would want to become the Amazon of _____ The blank could be used records, vintage clothes, used book…or even, hand crafted items. Yep, that idea is definitely going to come back to haunt us.

In 2014, ebay spun Paypal off into its own company…but, with a five-year agreement between the two companies requiring that PayPal serve at least 80% of eBay transactions. Which meant that Ebay also banned payment via check and money order for any of the auctions/sales on its site. Some buyers didn’t care about this, but others resented the basically mandatory Paypal fees that they now had to accept. And John Donohoe stepped down as CEO of ebay, replaced by Devin Wenig…who we’ll be talking about more in a bit.

Well, Ebay has been around for 24 years now…and a mature business like that has to fight twice as hard to continue to be bigger and more profitable year after year afer year…which means taking a look at the business and finding places where the company is missing a chance to make a dime. And in this case, Ebay saw a big opportunity with payments. Because wasn’t paypal…almost like a parasite…making money off of every transaction on ebay as teh payment method of choice? And making additional money off of sellers, too?

Last year, with Ebay’s contact with Paypal ending, Ebay created its own payment system, which transfers funds directly into sellers bank accounts. And Sellers were not excited about this. For one, transferring funds takes 3-7 days versus Paypals “instant” transfer. And Ebay can also deduct funds for returns and other issues directly from sellers bank accounts. As a result, sellers who have been using a paypal account and a Paypal debit card as their “bank” for years aren now being forced to open a checking account at a bank. And sellers are advising on another to keep several hundred dollars of padding in that account at all times so as not to overdraft when ebay decides to debit a refund or fee directly from that account. The fees seem to be about the same as paypal–although some sellers are warning that they actually end up being slightly higher. As of this June, sellers are required to move away from paypal in order to continue to sell on the platform.

Sellers are fed up…between the returns process, the increasing fraudulent behavior from buyers, increased fees, and now this payment situation…but while some may leave—I saw comments on Ebay’s community boards about shifting to selling on craigslist, facebook marketplace, and at flea markets…many many sellers will NOT leave ebay because they literally have no where else to go. And many of these sellers have been running a small business via Ebay for decades now. This is how they pay their bills and support their families. There is no where else for them to go. It’s ebay or nothing. They are trapped, and at the mercy of Ebay’s policies and its frequently sketchy, rude customers. They have no choice but to accept ebay’s policies, which they continue to say over and over again, are feeling more and more like Amazon’s, and less like the community that Ebay began as in the late 90s. There is no mutual trust between buyer and seller, and there certainly isn’t a sense of “we’re all in this together.”

Now, I’m going to cap off this story of Ebay with perhaps one of the wildest stories I’ve heard in a long time…and it just happens to involve Ebay.

On June 15, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice charged six former eBay employees, all part of the corporate security team, with conspiring to commit cyberstalking and tamper with witnesses. Who were they stalking? Why Ina and David Steiner, the husband and wife team that has been blogging away about Ebay on their website Ecommercebytes (formerly auction bytes) since 1999. On that day, June 15, 2020, The US attorney in Boston, Andrew Lelling said“This was a determined, systematic effort by senior employees of a major company to destroy the lives of a couple in Natick,all because they published content the company executives didn’t like.”

Let’s start with introducing the cast of characters here:

First off, Ina and David Steiner. They seem like nice people making an honest living off of helping sellers build businesses on ebay and amazon.

Next, David Wenig, who became CEO of in 2015. The New York Times described him as “maintaining a certain New York alpha quality.”

eBay’s new communications chief, Steve Wymer, who would report directly to Mr. Wenig. Wymer had worked for several Republican senators in the past.

A Twitter user known as Fidomaster aka @unsuckebay. His wife sold on ebay and he often felt that the policies regarding sellers were unfair, so he would tweet about it. His tweets rarely got a lot of likes, but Ebay’s Global Security and Resiliency analysts kept a file on him, and it quickly grew fat.

And oh yeah, Ebay’s Global Security and Resiliency team, lead by James Baugh. This team was tasked with protecting ebay from geopolitical and individual threats. There’s a whole cast of characters there, and I’ll introduce them as we move along because it’s just so many names!

So this story starts in 2019, when Ina Steiner wrote a blog post on Ecommercebytes titled “eBay CEO Devin Wenig Earns 152 Times That of Employees,” which btw, was absolutely true.

eBay disclosed the information as required by Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act….just part of a standard annual report for any publicly traded company.

The report said that Wenig earned $18.17 million in total compensation in 2018. The median of the annual total compensation of Ebays other employees, (not including Wenig) was $119,562. The report went on to say, “the ratio of the annual total compensation of Mr. Wenig to the median of the annual total compensation of all employees is estimated to be 152 to 1.”

Steiner’s blog post…which was very straightforward and primarily just information pasted directly from the annual report…went on to say that this was an increase over the previous year when Wenig’s income was 143 times the average ebay worker. The post ended with this:

“How interesting would it be to see a comparison of CEO pay to marketplace sellers!” I guess the implication was that his salary was coming at the cost of the sellers, who were struggling more than ever with ebay’s extremely pro-buyer policies…but I’m not even convinced about that!

I definitely would not have guessed that THIS was the beginning of a truly wild story.

Wymer–remember he’s the newish communications chief at Ebay–he texted a link to Wenig with the promise “We are going to crush this lady.”

And it was war–at least from Wymer and Wenig’s perspective. Everything that Steiner wrote just irritated Wenig to no end. At the end of May she wrote a 100% innocent post about Wenig promising to provide greater protection to sellers from buyer fraud.

“Shockingly reasonable…” Wymer wrote to Wenig.

“I couldn’t care less what she says,” Wenig replied, adding: “Take her down.”

The only other person that Wenig hated as much as the Steiners was that twitter user named “Fidomaster.” And James Baugh, the head of the global security team was convinced that either the Steiners were working WITH Fidomaster to take down Ebay or they WERE fidomaster…once again, Fidomaster didn’t have a ton of followers and didn’t get a ton of likes and retweets…so I’m not sure how he was taking down Ebay…but this is the mindset we’re dealing with here and I think it really sets the tone for everything else that comes next.

Eight days after Wenig’s “take her down” message, a member of the security team flew across the country and drove to the Steiners’ home, and he scrawled on the fence…. the word “FIDOMASTER.”

To this day, no one knows Fidomaster’s real identity. However, he also had a weird story about Ebay that he shared with the New York times. In mid-2019–around the same time that Ebay analyst flew across the country to write “Fidomaster” on the Steiner’s fence, Fidomaster received a message from a new Twitter user calling herself Marissa. She was a young woman in her 20s. She claimed to be a former Ebay employee and that she was in possession of quote “extremely damaging videos of executives misbehaving” and she wanted his (Fidomaster)’s help to get the video to the Steiners for their blog

The goal in here–in case you’re missing it… is that she wanted Fidomaster to reveal that he was working with the Steiners. And this ‘Marissa’ was just an analyst from that ebay security team.

Fidomaster was kinda like “Uh, you know that the Steiners literally have their email addresses on their website, you could just reach them that way.”

Marissa instead insisted that she should instead leave the videos on a thumb drive at “a hotel in the city of your choice.”

Eventually Fidomaster just blew Marissa off, because it was just getting too weird. And seriously: he did not know the Steiners.

In August Ina Steiner wrote a post about a lawsuit eBay had filed against Amazon. It was pretty straightforward and only a few paragraphs long…nothing too upsetting. But Thirty-three minutes after the EcommerceBytes article went up, Wenig texted Wymer “If you are ever going to take her down..now is the time.”

“On it,” Wymer responded.

Then he texted Baugh, the head of security.

His text said: “Hatred is a sin.I am very sinful.”

Baugh was ready to roll. He responded “Amen. I want her DONE. She is a biased troll who needs to get BURNED DOWN.”

Wymer sent an email to his team explaining the importance of this mission, that the executives at Ebay wanted this taken care of ASAP.

He said: “I genuinely believe these people are acting out of malice and ANYTHING we can do to solve it must be explored.” He ended the email “Whatever. It. Takes.”

So here was the plan: to frighten and harass the Steiners, but have them think it was someone else. Then, Ebay could swoop in and offer help, forcing the Steiners to get in line and maybe end the blog. It was called “the white knight strategy.”

I’m going to introduce another character in this story to you…her name is Stephanie Popp…she reported to Baugh (the head of global security) and the two of them encouraged their team to think of them as “Mom and Dad.” Popp created a fake twitter account with the name @Tui_Elei and the background story of this fake character was that he was an ebay seller from Samoa whose sales had been hurt by the Ecommercebytes blog.

Popp began sending increasingly nasty tweets to Steiner, with no response.

Finally @Tui_Elei wrote: “I guess im goin to have to get ur attention another way bitch…”

And on August 10 (which is btw my birthday) a package containing a bloody pig mask arrived at the Steiners’ home. Fourteen minutes later, @Tui_Elei wrote: “DO I HAVE UR ATTENTION NOW????”

That was just the beginning of the weird deliveries:

a book titled “Grief Diaries: Surviving the Loss of a Spouse”

A funeral wreath.

fly larvae , live spiders and a box of cockroaches.

Copies of the September issue of “Hustler: Barely Legal” arrived at the homes of neighbors with David Steiner’s name on them.

The day after the bloody pig mask arrived, Wymer–the communications chief at ebay–texted Baugh: “I want to see ashes. As long as it takes. Whatever it takes.”

Baugh shared the message with his deputy, David Harville, adding: “I’ve been ordered to find and destroy.”

A few days later, Baugh and one of his analysts, Veronica Zea, flew across the country to Boston to engage in physical surveillance of the Steiners. His deputy Harville joined them. Their goal was to put a GPS on the Steiners car. When they arrived at the house, they found that it was in a locked garage. They went to a hardware store to buy gloves and a prybar so that they could break in…but that plan ended up not coming to fruition.

Meanwhile, the Steiners were obviously frightened by all of the disturbing mail and tweets, so they had already reached out to the police and the police were going to be keeping an eye on the Steiners and their house.

The next day–the ebay gang–decided to follow the steiners as they drove around. But when they started listening to an internet feed of the Natick police radio, they heard that officers had spotted them…so they gave up.

At 4:30 a.m., a 24-hour pizzeria delivered $70 of pizza to the Steiner’s house. — and a demand for payment.

@Tui _Elei kept up his semiliterate invective, with graphic sexual references.

More pizza.

Craigslist ads appeared, announcing estate sales (“Everything must go!”) and nightly swingers parties at the Steiner home (“Come knock on the door/ring the doorbell anytime of day or night”).

@Tui _Elei doxxed their home address.

Harville flew back to the west coast, and Stephanie Popp took his place on the crew harassing the Steiners in Boston…They got a different rental car and tried to follow the Steiners again…but this time Mr. Steiner got a photograph of the car.

This was the lead the police needed. They tracked the rental car to Veronica Zea. They discovered that one of the pizza orders had been paid for with a gift card bought just a few miles from Ebay headquarters.

The police found Zea at her hotel and tried to speak with her…but she took off for the airport.

Back at Ebay headquarters in San Jose, the team began to retconn the story.

Managers also ordered up fake dossiers on the Steiners as persons of interest themselves, for the purpose of sharing them with police — to “make them look crazy,” as one of them put it, and discredit their harassment complaints.

They wrote one another emails that implied that they had just discover the @Tui_Elei twitter account and that they were concerned about the safety of the STeiners.

Eventually, it all collapsed as police closed in.

Baugh, and Harville were arrested and charged.

Zea, Popp, and three other analysts were charged but not arrested. They will still have to go to court. The charges for all of them are conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses;

Veronica Zea was fired.

Wymer was also fired.

Wenig resigned later in the month, saying it was clear he “was not on the same page” as the eBay board. No one mentioned the scandal. His exit package was $57 million. He later said a statement that he had done nothing wrong. “There was no direction, no knowledge, no private understanding, no tacit approval. Ever,” he said. “I was just speaking off the cuff.”

In June, of 2020 Wenig was re-elected to the board of General Motors, a position that pays $317,000 a year. Mary Barra, GM’s chief executive, called the cyberstalking scandal “regrettable” but noted “it didn’t involve any GM business.”

Wymer also has a new job, as the chief executive of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley.

The chair of the board said the nonprofit was “aware” of what happened at eBay, but believes Mr. Wymer is “a leader with integrity” and was the unanimous choice for the job.