E-commerce company eBay will have to pay US$3 million to a couple after a handful of its employees made it their mission to turn their lives into a nightmare for criticizing the company in a newsletter to sellers .
“The company’s employees and contractors involved in this campaign put victims through hell in a petrifying campaign to silence their reporting and protect the eBay brand,” the acting U.S. Attorney said Thursday. , Joshua Levy, according to CNN.
The Massachusetts court pulled no punches on Thursday, imposing the maximum legal fine of US$3 million on the eBay company for a horrifying campaign of intimidation and harassment that its employees allegedly carried out. live with a couple in 2019, according to the American media.
Indeed, the tone used by Ina and David Steiner in an online newsletter, which aimed to provide information to eBay sellers, would not have pleased certain employees, who would then have tracked down the couple to send them multiple packages terrifying.
Among them, the couple would have received “a box of live cockroaches”, “a book on how to survive the loss of a spouse and pornography”, noted the Department of Justice in a previous press release, but also a mask bloody pig, a fetal pig and a funeral wreath, according to CNN.
Some employees even allegedly monitored the couple’s home and placed GPS tracking devices on their vehicles, or even published their address on Craigslist inviting the public for sexual activities, according to the American media.
In total, six employees would face criminal charges, while Jim Baugh, eBay’s senior director of safety and security at the time, whom the prosecutor considers the “ringleader” of the affair, allegedly received a sentence of 57 months in prison in September 2022 for his role.
“We continue to offer our deepest apologies to the Steiners for what they have endured. Since these events occurred, new leaders have joined the company and eBay has strengthened its policies, procedures, controls and training,” said eBay CEO Jamie Iannone on Thursday.
