This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
They did all that terrible shit to these journalists, because they posted one short article about how the Ebay CEO was earning 152 times that of it's employees.
What's MORE ridiculous, is that's from 2019. Now it's more like 300 times.
I feel like that intimidation campaign of sending live cockroaches and bloody pig masks should really be going the other way, dontchya think?
Can I please get some cockroaches and pig masks from ebay too?
Federal prosecutors have said the harassment included anonymous deliveries of items like live cockroaches and spiders, a funeral wreath, and a bloody pig face mask to the couple’s home. The employees also sent pornographic magazines with the husband’s name on them to a neighbor’s home and planned to break into the couple’s garage to install a GPS device on their car.
Holy shit.
Another company to the "never again" list. I'm running out of online places to buy from 🥲.
i mean what kind of people run this company!? this is insane they are still on the board too imagine your boss makes you deliver death threats
"The company said the conduct “is not representative of eBay’s culture” and said it has since changed leadership and strengthened its policies, procedures and ethics training."
All employees are now required to attend trainings that include no sending of bloody pig masks, funeral wreaths and death threats. If the old leadership only had that mandatory training this would have never happened!
Ok 4 of the current board members during that are still on, so that was a lie.
Good find! Did not know that. I haven’t used eBay since the 2000s but I certainly won’t moving forward.
Every company already requires all of their employees to do ethics training, in order to get insurance so that's pathetic.
In a statement, Murphy cited the recovery amount, personal payments by former executives, a commitment for $7 million to go to nonprofits and the absence of a confidentiality provision in a system where “wrongdoers too often hide their misdeeds by dangling compensation in front of those they victimized and trading that compensation for confidentiality or an NDA.”
Glad they stuck to their guns. I’ve been following this case for a few years now. This all began as an attempt by eBay’s C-level executives to bully a few reporters into silence. It makes perfect sense that those reporters would refuse to accept an NDA as part of the settlement, because reporting on things like this is exactly what landed them on eBay’s radar in the first place.
We really do need a way to send companies to prison. If you behave like that as an individual, you are getting jailed. We obviously can't jail a company, but simply slapping some fine on them for criminal behaviour while their henchmen might get prison time is not the best way forward. So we might need something like "if your company is doing crimes, it gets disbanded" or so.
Hold the board liable.
Yup. Jail everyone director level and above who had knowledge of the crime and didn't report it.
I'd only go after those with exec roles since some board members have no direct control over anything but policy, not execution.
Well we'd have to build bigger prisons, and we'd have to ban privately owned prisons otherwise it would become an infinite loop.
Strip their C-levels of limited liability for corporate criminal behavior.
Revoking the corporate charter is, as you say, another excellent option, since that'll burn the fingers of shareholders. That's a strong incentive for more effective corporate governance.
The weakness of existing corporate governance is also a cause of the insane inflation in senior executive compensation. Corporate profitability has barely changed, but executive pay keeps skyrocketing. Meanwhile, in Japan and Korea, executive pay is far lower, but the companies perform about the same.
If the crime results in life in prison or the death penalty maybe.
If you haven't already, you need to listen to the Behind the Bastards coverage of it. The story is insane.
Behind the Bastards: Part One: That Time eBay's Private Spies Went To War With Some Bloggers
Episode webpage: https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/ebay-pt1
Behind the Bastards on Seal Team 6 just makes me want those entire wings of the american military machine dissolved in acid just to make sure their "pirate" bullshit gets expunged.
They're just incompetent murderers. They shouldn't be entrusted with a fucking freeze-pop they might cut themselves
How do you have two dudes beating a tied-up civilian and you end up with your own man down with a broken rib?
Absolute fucking incompetence that gets americans killed. The more crazy shit you do in the sandbox, the more enemies you make, the more the locals call for death to america.
If seal team 6's job was just to make foreigners hate americans, they succeeded. Thats all it did. And got killed. Including by drowning because their equipment was too heavy. Fucking stellar.
What on fucking earth?
Most of the defendants pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy and cyberstalking and were later sentenced to prison terms or home confinement.
The above includes several management and director positions. Glad individuals are being held responsible. Hope they are radioactive to companies going forward. As pointed out below, execs at the highest level are not doing time for this though.
Edited for clarity.
No, it doesn't. The convicted people were upper/middle management, the execs involved just have to pay some money now. Notably as a settlement and not a verdict.
James Baugh, of San Jose, California, who was eBay’s senior director of safety & security, and David Harville, of New York City, who was eBay’s director of global resiliency, are charged with conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses. The other former eBay employees charged are Stephanie Popp, former senior manager of global intelligence; Brian Gilbert, former senior manager of special operations for eBay’s Global Security Team; Stephanie Stockwell, former manager of eBay’s Global Intelligence Center; and Veronica Zea, a former eBay contractor who worked as an intelligence analyst in the Global Intelligence Center.
Seems like senior managers and directors. I don't think these are fall guys. They seem like they were personally responsible for these things. I know corpo speak invents fancy job titles, but I don't think it's a situation where someone's personal assistant is being used as a scapegoat. These people should have known better and had other options. I did see that one upper exec had to pay but I didn't see any outline for what exactly they were charged with. I wish the articles did a better job of going into the details of punishments vs charges but I was just pointing out that actual time is being done since the title doesn't mention it.
I'm not an expert at corpo terminology either, so maybe "middle management" is wrong, but I'm certain "senior director" is still not part of the executive ranks.
Wikipedia has an overview about all of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
I don't think the employees/managers were just fall guys, but I don't believe for a second the execs knew nothing about what they did. And I find it suspicious that the employees seemingly plead guilty without a lawyer, as the article you're quoting says.
Director is upper management, one step below executive and typically report directly to a C-suite member.
It means different things at different firms, but as a management (rather than board) role, it's as @village604@adultswim.fan says.
Source: I was one. Now I'm in a senior tech staff role in a very different organization. Far less of a snake pit.
Thank you, I edited my comment.
I certainly didn't mean to indicate csuite went to jail or anything, but it's fair to disagree with my classification. I'm not super involved with that sort of thing. Will edit my comment to reflect that so that no one takes away the wrong thing.
Appreciate the wiki link. I kinda just clicked around on site and didn't bother to search elsewhere.
I'm totally open to the idea that higher ups got away with a lot. They tend to, and likely even in this case where people are doing time they still got off way too lightly.
Damn, even for a company like Ebay that's not small change.
Although the damage to their reputation would be far more costly.
We used to do that to people who didn't pay back their loans but then again it was an illegal unlicensed money lending syndicate not an actual e-commerce site..
Absolutely insane behaviour.
