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- Hacker News
- by informal007
- Kinda insane that they felt pressured by a blog like ecommercebytes.
- Proof that if you write the truth, it doesn’t matter how legitimate the platform is, the message will always cut through.by rootsudo
- Good to know I can buy FT Digital Edition for undefined per month to read this article.by inigyou
- $<surveillance price pending>
- Behind the Bastards podcast did a series of episodes about this: https://youtu.be/pJhc7TBkVz4by jimkortge
- There've been a few recent submissions of this story over the past week or so, but none with significant discussion.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49079244> (6 comments) had the most activity.
So no, this wouldn't count as a dupe.
by dredmorbius - 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.
by ebbi - There has to have been more going on, it sure doesn’t add up - unless Ebay was run by a group of cruel Kindergarteners..
At every place I’ve worked, the employees likely had worse thoughts, at least at times, than anything an outsider could publish about the company.
by BobbyTables2 - 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.
- Ebay sucks but I'm not sure there are any better options in the states
- 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
by dmix - 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.
by Barbing - > It looks absolutely insane to me, but some people seem to defend it.
Before that policy, you had a bunch of items listed for $1 + $60 "shipping" to dodge fees. I'll take the current structure over that.
by Arainach - 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.by ltbarcly3
- That is a threat?
- 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.
by zhivota - 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.
by alexpotato - 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.by energy123
- "Trust but verify" and "Locks keep honest people honest"
Some people might be absolutely moral, but most just don't want to experience consequences
- >> "Whenever people are unsupervised and there is a chance for fraud or bad behavior.."
Idle hands are the devil's workshop. / The devil makes work for idle hands.
When the leave is too long, the soldier goes wrong.
by sandworm101 - > 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.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.3982/ECTA14673
by ninjagoo - Scott Adams had some deeply bizarre opinions about human behavior/relationships.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cursedcomments/comments/wqc1an/curs...
by jrflowers - 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.
by evan_ - 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.
by glenstein - 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]
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18602070/united-states-...
[2] Page 19, https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.227...
- 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
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/final-defendant-ebay-cybe...
by haunter - And on the other hand, let's see how the C-suite made out:
(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. 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. - When will the executives face criminal trial too?
“ 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.”
- > 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."
by deathanatos