
Inside eBay’s bizarre campaign against a blog critic - davidclark22
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ebay-harassment-campaign-pig-cockroach-blog-11593009038
======
cs702
Inexcusable. Sad. Horrible.

The two questions in my mind are:

First, how could something this horrible happen at such a high level at such a
prominent company? I mean, eBay is not some rinky-dinky business run by fly-
by-night operators in a shady part of town. We're talking about a well-known
publicly traded company that is a component of the S&P 500 with a market
capitalization in the tens of billions of dollars. Auntie Tilly would be
delighted to hear her niece got a job offer at eBay after college.

Second, is this kind of horrendous antisocial behavior ("we can do whatever we
want this side of legal with impunity") _representative_ of behavioral
patterns at the higher levels of large, prominent, powerful companies? Or is
eBay just an exception, the proverbial bad apple in a basket of mostly good
apples? I would hope it's the latter.

~~~
arpa
Sad? Horrible? How about batshit insane! C-suits going after nobodies is,
well... this. I mean, that must have been some crazy amounts of coke and bad
judgements all around, to get SIX seriously unhinged individuals to the top of
eBay of all the places. How does it even happen? I mean i've seen some amoral
corporate bullshit, and shady shit, strays into "not strictly legal" and "how
can legal cover our ass?", but this, this is crazy in literal sense.

~~~
__s
How does it happen?

Someone passes around a blog. Someone else jokes "wouldn't it be funny if
we...". Someone else says "Hey, I'm bored, we have loads of cash & free time,
sounds like a fun prank!"

Not hard to lose touch with the reality of what one's doing

~~~
fennecfoxen
Article discusses how they were not joking but, instead, paranoid that she was
getting funding from Amazon, their competitor.

------
rideontime
What amazed me most from the FBI affidavit[0] was the sheer arrogance of these
people. Baugh seriously thought he could make up some story on the spot to
explain eBay employees being on the opposite side of the country and the
police would just drop it.

[0] [https://www.scribd.com/document/465728291/FBI-Affidavit-
agai...](https://www.scribd.com/document/465728291/FBI-Affidavit-against-eBay-
employees-for-harassment)

~~~
anon892143
Another insider threat program gone rogue...

How many insider threat programs at various firms are really being used to
implement systemic discrimination?

I thought it was becoming common knowledge many Silicon Valley campuses and
other corporations use an IMSI catcher/Stringray to capture personal cellular
communications of its employees...

[https://www.businessinsider.com/ex-tesla-employee-claims-
the...](https://www.businessinsider.com/ex-tesla-employee-claims-theft-drugs-
and-surveillance-at-gigafactory-2018-8)

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/3/16408724/waymo-uber-
lewan...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/3/16408724/waymo-uber-lewandowski-
travis-kalanick)

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-nuvia-
lawsuit/apple...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-nuvia-
lawsuit/apple-lawsuit-tests-if-an-employee-can-plan-rival-startup-while-on-
payroll-idUSKBN1ZK16R)

I am pretty sure none of these people used their corporate issued cell
phones...

I would not be surprised if ebay hired a firm to park an IMSI catcher machine
close enough to the home of these people.

The reason they felt secure enough to deny these accusations implies they have
all done this before.

~~~
ajzinsbwbs
Lots of my coworkers use their corporate phone as their personal phone.
There’s a process for porting your phone number over when you get the corp
phone. People do it because it’s simpler to have one phone, or just to save
money. I would never do this but I understand why someone with a different
background and worldview would.

~~~
ghaff
Myself and probably most of my coworkers just use our personal phones as
company phones. Not sure if you see that as different. Also don't do
activities on them that are... criminal.

~~~
ajzinsbwbs
Suppose I buy an iPhone from Apple, and load up a work profile on it. I need
to trust that Apple doesn’t give my personal data to the employer profile, and
my employer doesn’t have a zero-day to circumvent those controls. I also need
to trust that the phone company (or my VPN) provider doesn’t give my browsing
history to my employer. I’m pretty comfortable with all of those assumptions.

Now instead suppose my employer gives me an iPhone with a cell plan they are
paying for. Now there are more questions - is this a vanilla iPhone or is some
kind of tracking software installed on it? Perhaps the phone company will
freely give up my browsing history to my employer? I’m a lot less comfortable
with this. It feels like my employer has legal authority and technical
capability to see a lot of what I’m doing on the phone.

Edit:

> Also don't do activities on them that are... criminal.

I’d not worried that employer would get me in trouble with the government for
criminal activity. My behavior is a little more constrained by worries that
somebody at company could be analyzing my browsing history for violations of
company policy, which in a worst-case scenario could get me terminated or
cause me to face civil litigation, especially if I were to do a startup.

~~~
ghaff
I generally agree although you may still be asked to install MDM on that phone
to access, say, work email. How obtrusive that MDM is depends on your
company’s policies.

------
gwd
Here's a non-paywalled version:

[https://liber.post-
gazette.com/news/nation/2020/06/15/eBay-e...](https://liber.post-
gazette.com/news/nation/2020/06/15/eBay-employees-cyberstalking-charges-
threats-Devin-Wenig-spiders-cockroaches-pig-mask-
Massachusetts/stories/202006150100)

Just insane.

~~~
dang
That's from 9 days ago and the story at that point was discussed here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23529035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23529035).

Not sure what's new in the current article.

------
hogFeast
Every part of this is wrong.

What happened to the targets was appalling. But why why why why do people
believe the utter fiction that these companies put out after this happened?

If you are the Board, what the hell are you doing here? This guy was clearly
not on the level, why didn't this come up? And why is anyone getting paid near
$100m to manage EBay into the ground. As an investor, this makes no sense. The
issue is that you have this perpetual circle of utter incompetent human beings
on Board spending other people's money.

And if you are the CEO, it doesn't matter if you knew it about or not. He is
quite clearly lying but what is most amazing here is that his lie doesn't even
explain the behaviour. If you are the CEO, THIS IS YOUR JOB! Take
responsibility. Also, he quite clearly was directly responsible for this. You
have to be an utter degenerate to know the police have texts of you saying to
take someone down, and then tell the media it was nothing to do with you.

This is why I truly despair as an investor though. You are surrounded by
people who are utterly and totally incompetent. Boards aren't up to it.
Executives aren't up to it. And I am trusting my reputation on them. This is
like having to ride a donkey in the Kentucky Derby.

(And btw, the EBay Board is apparently "stacked". Omiydar, the ex-CEO of Bain
is Chairman, VC/founders, CEO of Lyft, former Chairman of NBC, CEO of
Intel...all people who have mostly made their living acting as agents rather
than principals...btw, the head of the Compensation Committee was the guy who
is known only for driving Gap into the ground...something of an expert in
failure then).

~~~
celim307
I feel at a certain level of leadership in large companies, you just _make it_
into the club and no matter what you do, some other large company will pick
you up due to the same mindset of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM".

The last SVP of my working org dropped the ball so hard our client walked away
from hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware and infrastructure just to be
done with it. He got canned then picked up by a similar company inside two
months with the same title.

~~~
hogFeast
Correct. There was a post the other day about VC "pattern matching" causing
discrimination...this is the same thing.

Most executives are chosen because they look like executives, and have a good
CV. If you have failed but have an MBA from Harvard, people will give you a
pass.

I don't know how you solve this either btw. Part of the problem is people
failing but the obvious connected factor is companies hiring poorly. Hiring is
where many companies go wrong imo.

------
HNthrow22
This story is so wild, imagine being this couple and trying to tell the police
ebay execs are harassing me because I wrote mean things about them on the
internet. This is a widespread thing that's going on in our culture right now,
organized bullying and targetted harassment by those in power and it's having
devastating consequences on the public discourse. This case is unique because
the overconfidence and carelessness of the execs led to them being caught but
in most cases people aren't reckless enough to leave easily tracked evidence
of their misdeeds.

I can think of multiple examples of agriculture/pharma companies and game
publishers engaging in this type of retaliatory harassment, most cases they're
not careless enough to get caught.

~~~
catalogia
It makes me wonder how often things like this might be happening in cases that
typically get written off as somebody having paranoid persecution delusions
about being "gangstalked." If this couple had told me their story, I have
little doubt that I wouldn't have believed them.

~~~
claudeganon
Happens all the time, it’s just that the bad actors are usually more competent
and better at distancing themselves than the people at eBay.

A good example is what Chevron is doing right now to Steven Donziger, an
attorney who won a settlement against them for their polluting in Ecuador:

[https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/chevron-ecuador-
lawsuit-...](https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/chevron-ecuador-lawsuit-
steven-donziger/)

Also Weinstein’s use of Black Cube:

[https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/30/harvey-
weinstei...](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/30/harvey-weinstein-
black-cube-new-york-times)

------
soniman
There have been other cases like this, right? I can't think of them right now
but powerful people get obsessed with anonymous message board commenters and
then go on a rampage. Musk has called people at home and where they work. Back
in the day Yahoo message board posters used to drive companies crazy. It's a
weird phenomenon because literally the only people who care are the executives
themselves. Nobody else, not even their spouses or competitors, cares. I'll
call it Fishbowl Syndrome because the executives think they're in a fishbowl
under constant scrutiny and literally nobody else cares what's going on with
the fish.

------
danso
Easily one of the most bizarre stories of corporate malfeasance I've ever
heard about. The blog/newsletter in question is likely the top in its niche,
but it wasn't even in the top 200,000 of sites ranked by SimilarWeb – the WSJ,
which according to the affidavit the executive mused as being the next of
their targets – is ranked in the top 900.

In fact, most of this blog's coverage was linking to and discussing eBay-
related stories from mainstream press like the WSJ. The pure malice of the
alleged actions is unfathomable, but how did these senior managers and
contractors have the time to even give a shit?

~~~
thatlongthrow1
They are paid too much for the supposed labor they give out, so they have the
finances and time to ruin the lives of people they deem to be below them.

Which just happens to be everyone who is paid less than them.

The solution is to gut executive pay several thousand percent so it is back in
line with the rest of the world.

~~~
jacobush
Agree with you 100%. Funny how we have the thread next door here on HN full of
people explaining how billionaires worked hard to get their money and deserve
to create their little dynasties with it.

------
wyldfire
[http://archive.is/f7HSw](http://archive.is/f7HSw)

~~~
davidcollantes
This doesn't work.

~~~
llacb47
What specifically doesn't work?

~~~
runarb
Same for me. I do get an DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN in Chrome, but other
archive domains like [https://archive.vn/f7HSw](https://archive.vn/f7HSw)
works.

~~~
driverdan
Their domain doesn't work with Cloudflare DNS because they use non-standard
records.

~~~
dylz
They don't use non-standard records; if your resolver protects your privacy by
not sending them your IP, they will intentionally return bad records
specifically to fuck with you.

~~~
thatlongthrow1
This is the correct comment, they purposefully block Cloudflare traffic due to
them not forwarding user data.

They stated they need it to stay in line with the law but they can do that
with things like the user's IP. To go that far to insist on getting a specific
type of user data is sketchy.

~~~
dylz
They do quite a bit worse on top of that, ctrl-f pixel.archive.is in view
source when you visit any archived page.

------
stx
What was this couple writing about Ebay that made the execs so angry that they
would risk committing crime? I would imagine a company the size of Ebay has
many people writing bad things about it. What was different in this case? I
have been searching but cant find anything. I found the news letter was called
EcommerceBytes.

~~~
notahacker
Yeah, it's odd. You can understand security types with no ethics or
considerations of negative publicity might feel inclined to harass people they
think are giving away corporate secrets or exposing misdeeds or wrecking their
acquisition plans, but a massive b2c platform company with the inevitable
amount of criticism going after trade bloggers for some uncomplimentary
articles some of their sellers might read is just bizarre. It doesn't look
like their coverage of ebay is particularly negative, and it's not like
there's a lack of actual scammers for bored security types to pursue.

------
adrianmonk
Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23529035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23529035)

------
walrus01
The character "Hoover" in HBO's silicon valley is not extremely far off the
mark, as a parody of ex-law-enforcement/intelligence types who end up working
for big corporate america.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY2A3c3-lUY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY2A3c3-lUY)

~~~
ponker
That entire show is just a 5% exaggeration of the real Silicon Valley.

~~~
ideals
In a lot of ways that shows has to play down how fucked the culture is in
tech/ SV.

------
jwilber
Disgusting. Never shopping from eBay again, though I can’t remember the last
time I did if I’m being honest.

How do current employees feel about this?

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
I just finished reading and all I can say is kudos to NPD ( polite,
professional and effective ). It still speaks volumes about the arrogance od
the executives since it is clear that they thought it could have easily become
' we dont know; we cant track em'.

------
lowdose
From the bottom up in an organization you only see the Peter Principle at
work. From top down you realize this is just a matter of perspective because
from the top you witness an additional layer of narcissism and then piramide
is called the Gervais principle. This is actually the default mode many
companies end up in.

[https://blas.com/the-gervais-principle/](https://blas.com/the-gervais-
principle/)

------
pyuser583
I’m reminding of the “stay-behind” teams from the Cold War.

NATO was afraid of a Soviet invasion. They knew in a ground war, the Soviets
would take several countries.

So countries created “stay-behind” teams to coordinate resistance in the
aftermath of an occupation.

The problem is these teams had nothing to do. So they “made themselves busy”
by bothering domestic groups they thought were pro-communist.

It was a big problem in Italy.

These guys have titles like “Director of Global Resilience.” Their job is to
keep operations up and running in a catastrophe.

But there was no catastrophe (yet). So they kept themselves busy.

------
pmlnr
Tangential-ish to the story, but if in reaction someone wanst tp boycott ebay,
where would one sell small, one-off lots? Old hardware, used books, etc?
Facebook is a no-go. Gumtree is owned by ebay. Amazon is also a nasty company.

I'm in the uk, so no craigslist.

------
iJohnDoe
Is there still any overlap between PayPal and eBay? We often hear stories
about PayPal’s toxic behavior. Maybe PayPal’s and eBay’s toxic culture is
shared.

------
sizzle
Anyone know how they got deleted and decrypted WhatsApp chat messages between
the individual?? I thought WhatsApp was end to end encrypted? iCloud backups?

~~~
jacekm
FBI got access to the phones in question. And you can do quite a lot with
physical access to a device, including restoring messages from local cache. I
don't know the technical details, but googling for "forensics whats app
deletes messages" yields several interesting articles.

------
neonate
[https://archive.vn/f7HSw](https://archive.vn/f7HSw)

------
saltedonion
Stories like this makes me wonder if episodes such as this one are much more
prevalent than we hear.

------
brown9-2
“director of global resiliency” is one heck of an interesting job title

------
solotronics
Yeah this whole thing is playing out really strange.

------
jwiley
Is there any non-paywalled variant of this story at another news site?

------
TheRealPomax
title is missing [paywall]

~~~
floatingatoll
The footer Guidelines do not specify that usage, and arbitrary tags other than
[video] [pdf] (year) are historically unacceptable to the mods here. If you
think that this should be added to the guidelines, consider emailing the site
mods using the footer Contact link.

~~~
dang
[audio] and [slides] are also ok! I forget if there are others.

~~~
floatingatoll
Excellent! You should add those to the guidelines :)

------
malwarebytess
This is the fear of many people with mental illness: gangstalking.

~~~
stx
Its amazing every time I come across one of these people on youtube that
believe they are being gang stalked or e harassed. Even though I am pretty
sure they are not being stalked to them it IS real. That must be a terrible
existence. If I were to try to convince them otherwise they would assume I am
in on it.

~~~
saalweachter
It's unfortunate when _most_ people who think they are victims of a conspiracy
are mistaken or delusional, but _sometimes_ people actually are.

We can't just disregard all of the claims, we also can't just credulously
believe every claim, but they also are numerous enough -- and difficult enough
to investigate -- that we also can't feasibly do a thorough investigation of
each.

~~~
catalogia
I suspect it's probably the case that most are crazy, but I'm not confident.
Youtube, reddit, etc are where I get this impression from, but these sites
optimize for views and therefore have a tendency to amplify the more
sensational examples of anything.

