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
There is a chance there wasn’t anything incriminating. The top guys kept conversations live or intimated they wanted something done; the lowers took the planning and execution upon themselves.
Yup, i've worked long enough with senior mgmt to know that anything of interest for prosecution won't be written down, especially not on company devices. Those making the mistakes of writing things down are those actually prosecuted, the ranks and files.
In my own experience, the brass sets the culture and expectations that encourage department heads to break the law. Certainly there are done CEOs explicitly commanding people to do crime, but it's more common to tell people to, eg, move fast, focus on profits, and do whatever needs to get done.
I was told to do something that was a crime by my line level manager at a tech company when I was only a few years in my career, with code that he hand wrote and wanted me to type in and commit under my name.
When I refused he called me into a 1:1 and verbally told me I would be losing my job if I didn’t and only backed off when I told him he was never getting that paper back and asked if he wanted to go HR right now at which point I would be going to legal and didn’t care if I lost my job as long as he was implicated.
Only time in my career it’s happened, but it happens.
That's why the burden of proof needs to shift and our thinking about responsibility needs to shift. Your liability should increase in parallel with the benefits you derive from your position. If you are getting rich from running ebay then you will lose that wealth when something like this happens; it doesn't matter whether you directed it or even knew about it; you don't get to get rich if bad things happen while you are in charge.
If anyone in leadership asks me to do anything that I find personally concerning, I'll write an email asking them to confirm that's what they want me to do.
"You take care of it." means "Murder him and dump the body into a building foundation."
"I don't see any problems." can mean "The ambush will happen at the scheduled time. Vinnie will clean up the bodies."
etc.
You'll also see a lot of politicians using "dog whistle" statements, that are interpreted by listeners to mean something entirely different from the stated words.
That's assuming they're wiretapped. For corporate comms, just remember that email is discoverable while video calls typically aren't even retained. Be as explicit as you want, especially if you can rope a lawyer into the call and claim it's privileged.
But it's mind-boggling that any subordinate couldn't understand that such levels of depravity and insanity could land them in legal trouble, and that's besides the ethical issue.
I'm not a lawyer, but isn't RICO meant to give a way to prosecute those who are at the top of organizations that have people committing crimes like this?
Cush consulting jobs after the fact. You don’t burn your social network unless the alternate is serious jail time. Given the slaps on the wrists described, clearly the after conviction pay day is more valuable.
This is well before most HN readers' time, but Michael Milken, the "Junk Bond King," was handed a $600,000,000 fine and a ten-year prison sentance for insider trading and racketeering. He was also barred from reëntering the securities industry. When he was released from prison after serving less than two years, he became a "consultant" charging a flat $25 million fee for his services, which avoided the ban on working in the securities industry.
Trump pardoned him in 2020. Consequences are incredibly elastic for people at the top of the food chain.
If executives were at any risk of facing repercussions for their negligence, greed or outright villainy, I suspect fewer people would aspire to become one or remain one for very long.
> eBay entered into a deferred prosecution agreement and admitted to a detailed recitation of all the relevant facts about its conduct and agreed to pay a criminal penalty of $3 million, which is the statutory maximum fine for these six felony offenses.
Scaled from eBay's $11.1B/y to a person making $70k/y, that's proportional to a $18.92 fine.
"The statutory maximum for these six felony offenses."
“ The seven members of eBay’s security team were all criminally charged and sentenced to prison, home confinement or time served.
Other executives went on to other corporate jobs. Wymer and Wenig left eBay in September 2019, before the charges were filed. The following year, Wymer was appointed chief of the non-profit Boys and Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley. Wenig has been on General Motors’ board since 2018 and now runs an AI start-up. Jones remained at eBay until 2020 and now sits on Prudential Financial’s board.
The Steiners sued the trio and other former executives along with the company in the case that led to the $56mn payout. Under the terms of the settlement, Wenig agreed to pay $2mn, Jones must contribute $500,000 and Wymer $50,000, according to the pair’s lawyers.”
Dream a little dream of the world you want, then be prepared for the alarm to go off to rejoin the real world. An insignificant number of people care and while everyone else does business with anyone as long as there's benefit for them. As exhibit A, I present all of history
Many of the worst offenders have survived boycotts because people don't care enough to change habits. They may vocally state their support of a boycott, yet continue to use the services of the boycott target. (It's easy to change your avatar on the socials as a virtue signal, but it takes effort to actually follow through.) Walmart, Amazon, etc have all survived boycotts but they have not been hurt nor changed their ways. The number of people that have permanently boycotted these places are insignificant. For example, personally, I no longer have a Prime account and do not shop at Walmart. Neither company notice. Even if all of the readers of HN stopped using either service, neither would be affected in a significant way even if they did notice.
And on the other hand, let's see how the C-suite made out:
Wymer was appointed chief of the non-profit Boys and Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley. Wenig has been on General Motors’ board since 2018 and now runs an AI start-up. Jones remained at eBay until 2020 and now sits on Prudential Financial’s board.
(These were the Chief Communication Officer, CEO, and SVP for Global Operations, respectively)
> Wymer was appointed chief of the non-profit Boys and Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley
Boys and Girls Club of Silicon Valley lists its corporate donors as including Alliance Roofing · Amgen Foundation · Applied Materials · ASML · Comcast · Deloitte · EY · First Tech Federal Credit Union · Fremont Bank Foundation · Groundworks · Microsoft · NetApp · Peninsula Building Materials (PBM) · Project Learn / Panda Cares · Rite Aid Healthy Futures. If you work at or with any of these, flag this reporting to them.
The organization also appears to work with the City of San Jose and the Morgan Hill school district. (An abusive alleged excon running a kids’ charity is absurd to the point of being hilarious. Whoever was supposed to vet him for hiring should also find a new calling.)
I adore our local boys and girls club, our kids are there every weekday and they adore it too. We have donated a little bit of money monthly for almost a decade. I do not love the big money vanity donors but they are what make the place tick.
This is another level… I would be so angry if this clown were running our metro area. I feel obligated to write letters to all of those donors even though we are on the other coast.
> our kids are there every weekday and they adore it too. We have donated a little bit of money monthly for almost a decade
Write to the national organization. Like, this guy is credibly accused of—and has settled claims around—seriously abusive behavior. He should not be around kids.
Simple, one page: I am a donor and a parent who trusts their kids to your organization. I saw this reporting and was shocked.
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.
From the facts that came out at his trial [1], it seems like Baugh, the guy who ran the operation, was basically feral. At one point during his cross-country trip to harass these people, he was also trying to organize a blackmail campaign (with eBay personnel and resources) against a prosecutor in Arkansas who was charging his father with something? [2]
It might do, if that city had some level of public trust in its police. I don't know what, say, Los Angeles coppers could commit to record that might lower opinions. Beating confessions out of golden eagles? Cannibalism? The mark of the beast? Everyone already assumes they do this.
I think you're right that there's no principled or well-reasoned stopping point that aligns the behavior with any notion of consistency. But I think for a case like this no further answer is necessary then that people and circumstances and the variables that drive them to be motivated and to lock in on a special case, are sometimes simply idiosyncratic.
So I'm ready to believe it might have only been one. Although it naturally raises the question. You can't imagine they would volunteer data on additional harassment campaigns.
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.
It's funny that you'll find rich commenters aligned with opinions like Adams' on HN. I guess either wealth makes you paranoid, or the other way around perhaps.
> 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.
Do you have any evidence to support your claim?
On the contrary, a 2019 analysis [1] combined 400+ experimental treatments, 44,000+ participants, and 47 countries. Participants surrendered roughly three-quarters of the money they could have obtained through maximal lying. In repeated experiments, fewer than one participant in twenty consistently claimed the payoff-maximizing outcome. Increasing the potential reward from a few cents to approximately $50 did not cause people to approach maximal dishonesty.
In a field experiment [2] with 17,000+ apparently lost wallets in 355 cities across 40 countries, people were generally more likely to report wallets containing money than wallets containing no money. The effect appeared in 38 of the 40 countries. The researchers’ follow-up evidence pointed to concern for the owner and an increased aversion to thinking of oneself as a thief when more money was involved.
I don't think these studies meaningfully replicate the motivation of real life situations where there is either a lot of money on the line or emotional investment. Anyone can be honest when it's $20 on the line
In one of my college courses, 100% of my fellow students cheated, including me. This is when I learned that virtually every person is deep down a liar and a cheat if they think they won't face consequences and it's in their benefit, and any public facade of virtue that people put up, common in this industry, is a manipulation strategy that is just more cheating, although of a different kind.
I don't think that's the lesson. What I take from that is that people adapt to norms and incentives they have.
Despite all the talk about "academic integrity" and whatnot, very rarely were there punishments for people who cheated. For every professor that wrote FRAUD in the grade sheet and escalated to the Disciplinary Committee, there were 100 that turned a blind eye or at most confiscated a paper being passed around when the exam was being administered. This hypocrisy irked me much more than the cheating itself, in which I didn't partake mostly because 1) I thought it was kind of beneath me, something only mediocre students did (which I came to realize was not really true) and 2) I didn't care that much about the grade.
At my federal job, there was a student intern position that was available. The only requirement was a 3.0 gpa or better. Unofficial transcripts were submitted each semester. One day they asked for official ones and eight people immediately quit.
I guess they were printing their grades and then fat fingering them to inflate their grades.
I get your point, but it drives home how people can cheat if there’s a way.
Probably the employer could fork over the fees to verify the grades would rectify most of this.
Yea, same. I had many opportunities in college (who doesn't?), never did. It's not hard, you just need to actually try to learn.
If I was in a course where it was so poorly taught that cheating was the only feasible way to pass, I'd go talk to the dean. Things like that don't get fixed unless people complain, because how would anyone making decisions know?
It sometimes works, there's no reason to leave stuff like that for the next group of people to suffer through too. E.g. I'm extremely proud of my wife for this kind of thing, as she managed to get nearly a whole class to complain about an awful pseudo-science-pushing teacher, and got them kicked out in fairly short order.
Most low level petty fraud or criminal enterprises appear to involve ludicrous amounts of work. You’d be better off actually doing a normal job. Yet some people prefer the former.
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.
You still get suspicious shipping prices just not as extreme perhaps. For a platform like eBay where I am less likely to buy multiple different items from one seller and that is integrated internationally, the list price should just include shipping (and import fees!) anyway to make comparisons easier.
I use ebay heavily and I don't see it anymore, except for things that look like typos or people who clearly just don't know how to use ebay. There's no advantage to doing so because sorting/filtering includes shipping.
Sorting is strict when you select "Price + Shipping: lowest first", for the main results. It's been that way since they started adding fees to shipping.
Too expensive for things you can sell for cash on one of the dumb local marketplaces or on Craigslist.
Super niche stuff you need to be able to advertise to Timbuktu & Japan & LA & NY in hopes of finding a single buyer… fine take your 15%.
Great place to buy new stuff w/o enriching Bezos. Filter Buy It Now + Lowest Price First & hope they’ve fixed the “list a 99 cent cable alongside the $15 widgets you actually want, or price cap + use Best Match.
eBay has always nickle and dimed you. I remember a friend saying that in the early 2000s when he ran a big eBay store. He always tried to avoid eBay but you made money easier online than at a flea market or Craigslist which come with their own headaches.
He's much happier doing live auctions on WhatNot these days, which seems to be eating into eBay's business
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.
I was working at eBay as a Director of Engineering (the startup I work for was unfortunately acquired by eBay a few years earlier) at this time (none of us new any of this was going on of course), and I emailed the CEO about my concerns about the performance review process causing people to keep 'donkeys' on their team so they would have someone to give the Needs-Improvement review to (due to stack ranking) and an HR Sr. Director was literally sent to my desk to find me and "discuss my concerns" and she told me "a lot of people in this industry are paid more than they could get at another company and if they lost their job they might not be able to find another job as good". Luckily due to autism I just agreed with her and didn't realize it was a threat until years later or I likely would have said something unfortunate.
I worked at Milo and Wenig always seemed like an empty suit. Had much better experiences with Donahoe who helped us with the homepage revamp (I was on that team).
One thing I learned through that project was that eBay was a den of vipers when it comes to corporate backstabbing and turf protection, and since then I've come to believe every company above a certain employee count will inevitably become this due to unavoidable incentive pressure.
I was also at Milo! Have you noticed that the current ebay homepage is very close (but still not as good) as the original Feed demo?
My analysis of big companies, at least slow growth shitty ones like ebay, is that at VP and above levels there is a constant war of everyone against everyone to try to manage the largest organization and thus demand the best pay and promotion possibilities either at that company or by jumping ship. There's a zero-sum game, if everyone is B tier then everyone stays where they are and gets the same pay. Since the people at that level at companies like that tend to be imbeciles hired through nepotism or as a reward for previous crooked acquisitions or insider deals the easiest way to look better than your peers is to sabotage them. Since the next level up management is even more likely to be there due to nepotism of one kind of another they get away it.
I remember some large projects I was on where within 2 weeks of the project starting people were already setting up to place the blame on other teams when the project failed. It didn't matter if anything shipped, it only mattered that you weren't the team blamed for it not shipping.
I imagine this kind of behavior is common everywhere, and the bodies responsible for enforcing things (examples: data protection, consumer protection) just go "hmmmm sorry we're understaffed", "we don't take action on everything" or just refuse to investigate internally because nobody would EVER blatantly break the law :^).
Every time I hear someone say “the private sector will self-govern” or anything of the kind, I think of any one of the probably tens of thousands of examples of this that history knows about.
If there is any one thing that capitalism can not and will not ever do, is reward a self-governing company in any way. Add human nature in the mix and you get vindictive human scum like these people. Or any one of tens of thousands of other people (100s of millions, really) who would gladly crush another human without ever even feeling bad about it, never mind having the wherewithal to stop and think “hey this may not be a great idea”.
A human without power is a danger to others. Add this to the mountain of evidence proving it.
