Part Two: That Time eBay's Private Spies Went To War With Some Bloggers

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
A media Oh my gosh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards,
a podcast that recently also pivoted to video, but not
this week. For me. You are seeing, Jason, You're seeing
some sort of animated version of me right now, because
every week my camera does something different for reasons that

(00:21):
are unfathomable to me and deeply frustrating. I love pivoting
to video, Jason. That's something you and I both have
great experiences with, and it's working really well.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
There's a wonderful little lesson here, listeners, Because Robert is
using a very fancy actual camera, the type of which
you would use to film a professional video. I am
using a fifty dollars Logitech web camera that has no
buttons on it. There's not a single button there. Software
that operates great. No, I can't do I can't screw

(00:55):
up the setup of it because I never did anything.
I plugged in the little USB cord and I appear
if anything else other than that had happened, I would
have been helpless.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Yeah, and that's how we used to do things before
we recorded video, and it looked fine, and then we
got a camera that also looked fine but breaks periodically.
Because I don't know why anyway, Jason, do you think
we should bomb all of the power plants and return
to living in caves like our ancestors fighting bears for

(01:28):
scarce resources.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Those are my favorite social media accounts that talk about
like we need to get back to when we are
all just each growing our own food. That's when the
standard of living was higher. Back we all when one
blight could wipe out your crops and your whole family
would start.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
It's the fact of that. I just it would be
so much more refreshing to deal with a bear right
now than a camera. I understand a bear right.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Bears are are very easy. They have very very obvious
ONTs and needs. I don't have to figure out how
a shutter works for a bear. I just have to
figure out how to get higher than the bear, or
hide my food in a big barrel, or have like
spears and hide around a fire. I think we should
replace all of our technology with bears, Jason, is kind
of where I land on this on this journey, Like

(02:23):
what if instead of you know, for example, kids using
chat GPT to do their college essays, they just brought
bears to school and we let the bears fight it out.
You know, it's a better world.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
I mean, it's my understanding that that's how the Soviet
Union worked for centuries, is an entirely bear based society
based on the various cartoons I saw.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
Yeah, that's what Marx was really working at, was getting
getting us all back to a foundation of bears. Anyway,
I don't know why we got off on the tangent, Jason,
are you ready to hear more about how eBay just
absolutely loses its mind and has a former CIA guy
try to destroy the lives of a nice elderly blocker couple.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
Yeah right, here's where this becomes one of the weirdest
stories I've heard in my entire life.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Yeah, well that's and more well just actually that, but
there's a lot there when we come back from the
cold open, and we're back from the cold open, so, Jason,
a mega corporation like eBay makes a lot of enemies,
and the Steiners are not the only people on Devin

(03:32):
Winnigs shit list. However, his shit list was entirely, weirdly,
freakishly petty, one of the people he hated most, the
only guy really at the same level on this as
the Steiners on Devin shitlist was an anonymous Twitter account
called Fido Master aka at unsuck eBay. Now, you and

(03:54):
I have dealt with this guy all our lives. Right
this is an angry dude online who hates you, specific
for reasons that are complex and deeply personal, in Fido
Master's case, based on some stuff he's made public. Because
we actually don't know who this guy is. His wife
used to sell things on eBay and got angry at
company policies, and so he just decided to become their

(04:16):
loudest hater on Twitter. Now I'm saying this. When I
say a hater, I don't mean like, you know, there's
people right now, there's a whole industry, and like there's
there's a bunch of guys who make all of their
money now that Musk has monetized Twitter, like sharing different
clips of different right wing grifters that they hate, and
like those guys exist on the right too. There's like

(04:38):
entire accounts dedicated to Joe Biden or like libs of
TikTok and stuff where they're monetized hating accounts. That's a
sizable chunk of Like how you make money in Internet
content is like picking one person or a specific group
of people, grabbing clips of them doing stuff out in
the world and then just being a hater and a
lot of that stuff. It's not it's you know, we

(04:59):
can argue about what it says about humanity that it's
so profitable, but it's profitable because millions of people engage
with that content, right. They listen to it, they read it,
they share it. It's extremely popular stuff, Fio Master.

Speaker 2 (05:11):
Our internet economy would collapse if that personality type disappeared.
We really need them.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, it's like a solid forty percent of Silicon Valley's
money is related in one or another. Did that kind
of guy? Fido Master is not really that kind of
an account. Most of his posts about eBay when in
the period where he becomes like the obsessive focus of
a lot of the CEO's anger, get like a dozen likes. Right, Yet,

(05:39):
for reasons unknown, the entire c suited eBay kind of
pivoting off of Devon's obsession, came to believe that Fido
Master had dominated the social media narrative around the company,
that this guy is like has influenced how everyone online
is talking about eBay because of his insidious posting skills. Now,

(06:01):
I have not seen any evidence whatsoever that this guy
harmed eBay's bottom line in any way. And like with
the Steiners, at least you can say, yes, there were
people at Elliott Management and other big investment funds who
took seriously what the Steiners were saying. I don't think
that's really true of anyone. For Fido Master, he just,

(06:22):
for whatever reason, winning can't get over the fact that
there's this hater on eBay talking shit about how he's
running the company.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
I'm telling you, this kind of paranoia has been everywhere
since Twitter came along. There are companies that had entire
meetings with all of their executives over how over they
had rolled out some product or some ad campaign about
They were having a meeting with their their PR people
everybody else about the backlash we're getting on Twitter. We're

(06:51):
getting canceled on Twitter, when what they were talking about
was a total of three people complaining and each of
their each of their tweets got four likes. But the
perception that, oh my gosh, we're getting canceled on Twitter.
People used to be and maybe still are that used
to be so scared of that that they would immediately

(07:13):
fire somebody or immediately pull the ad whatever based on
the meager's tiniest little bit of criticism on there. So
I can totally see how they got freaked out by it.

Speaker 1 (07:24):
And it's it's the same like as journalism has gotten
to haul that out as an injury as an industry.
There's like a lot of political journalism as just leftists,
Like look at this new trend that's spreading among leftists,
or look at this new trend spreading among Trump supporters,
And it's like, well, you got three Twitter accounts there,
You've got like a handful of posts a guy made
that might have just been a joke. And I haven't

(07:45):
seen any evidence that anyone did anything in the real
world as a result of this. But suddenly like this
is a trend, or this is a trend among gen
z because you found like a dozen kids joking about
it or whatever.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
Like it does not take a dozen They can find
literally you can you read those articles they typic have
literally three examples. That seems to be the rule with
most newsrooms. If you can find three tweets, three tiktoks, whatever,
you can now say, well, there's a new trend among
gen z it's and they make up a name for it. Yeah,
It's like, no, it was these three people who all
went to the same middle school.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
Yeah, And that kind of thinking is clearly at play
with Winning and with eBay's c suite here, right, every
regardless of how much actual engagement he's getting, because some
of Fino Master suites do get a lot more engagement,
but there's no evidence even the ones that do are
moving the needle for eBay. What moves the needle for
eBay is the c suite wasting a shitload of money

(08:38):
and not adequately responding to the fact that Amazon is
starting to eat their lunch. Right, But that would require
like them to take a hard look at how they
actually function as executives as opposed to just obsessing over
this Twitter account.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
So you're seeing the same thing with Hollywood today, where
there will be some movie that they spent three hundred
million dollars on based around a comic book character nobody
had ever heard of, and bombs and then somebody there
in the studio will say, well, you know what it was.
It was all these trolls on Twitter, these these right
wing trolls. It's like, man, they can't sink a blockbuster movie,

(09:16):
these twenty five trolls on Twitter, they cannot sink a franchise.
You did that, You did that.

Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yep, and it's a I mean, I don't know. I've
been kind of shocked at the reaction to The Acolyte
because I watched that and like I didn't like it
as much as I liked and or, but like it
struck me as like, oh, if you're someone who's into
like the classic Star Wars stuff, the Jedi and the Lightsabers,
this seems like it has everything you want. Some of
the best choreographed fights I've ever seen. The whole thing

(09:43):
looks great, some decent performances like but no, just the
reaction to it is this is the biggest disaster in
Disney history, and a lot of it just seems to
be because like people on Twitter got angry at.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
It, maybe, but also that show cost six hundred thousand
dollars per y minute right of screen time, Like like
you can say, well, it's all these backlash from these jerks,
Like if the show had been good and if you'd
kept it on some sort of a reasonable budget, you've
been fine. It's you know, like the backlash was there,

(10:15):
but if anything, had just made the show more visible.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
But yeah, anyway, anyway, fascinating stuff. And yeah, so this
is you know, we're talking about kind of how it's
written large with these massive Hollywood productions and stuff. But
what we're seeing in eBay is like how these obsessions
actually spread within the heads of the people running these companies.
And I do think it's kind of worth making the
comparison to like how corporations respond to some of these

(10:40):
like weirdly outlandish ways, to like Twitter trolling, because it
is the same like psychology on display at least. So
because Fido Master is an obsession to winning, he winds
up getting, you know, getting on Bog's plate. Right enough,
people who are one step below the CEO but a
step or two above Bog forward him like, Hey, the

(11:03):
boss is really freaking out about this guy. Here's another post.
You should really look into this guy. Right, And for
reasons that have never been explained to me, Bog becomes
convinced that Fido Master is not just some guy with
a grudge against eBay. It's Na Steiner or her husband David,
and they're running some sort of complex scheme whereby they
have both a blog where they publish very fair journalism

(11:26):
that's sometimes critical of eBay and this Twitter account that
just kind of trolls the company, and they're trying to
operate both in tandem to destroy eBay's profitability and personally
damage Devin Winning. Right. That is the theory that former
CIA operator fucking Jim Bog comes up with. And there's

(11:48):
no reason for him to think this. The writing is
not similar between the account and anything that stein Ena does. Uh,
and Bog has no evidence that there's like that the
posts are coordinated with the twi wheets or the articles
you're coordinated with the tweets. But based on just this
kind of feeling he has, he decides he calls this
former police captain that he has doing physical surveillance of

(12:11):
the Steiner residents and he says, I want you to
go onto their property at night and spray paint the
name Fido Master on the outside of their home because
that'll let him know we're onto their scheme.

Speaker 2 (12:26):
So the idea was that this is going to prove that,
this will be showing them like, hey, we're onto you.

Speaker 1 (12:34):
Right, we know what you're doing.

Speaker 2 (12:36):
I know.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
It's to prove it it's to.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
Like smoke confused, must have been what must they have
thought that even was? I mean, I think he might
do it. He said he was ordered to do it.

Speaker 1 (12:47):
He doesn't do it? Yes, yes, And I think if
I'm the Steiners at this point, my assumption would be like, oh,
maybe that's some like graffiti artist with a weird tag
and oh, Fido master, he tags freeways in a casion
suburban homes outside of Boston. It's his favorite thing, you'd.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
Assume, or maybe it was slang or something. You would
never figure it out.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
You would never assume this was done by a former
police captain on the orders of a former CIA operator
working directly for the c suited eBay, because that's insane.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
So now the question is did that CEO who we
spent most of the last episode talking about, did he
know this occur? Or is there any way to know
like if this, if he did know, is something that
would have been said verbally in a hallway and not documented.

Speaker 1 (13:32):
Somewhere, not in now a lot of messages get deleted,
So I guess the answer I would say is not
in a way that has been proven in court in
such a manner that it makes it legally obvious that
Devin Winning was responsible for this. Do I think it's
likely he had some awareness of what his security team
was doing. I think that's a fair thing to state.

(13:55):
But again, a lot of messages are not present, and
most of Bob does have some a good amount of
direct contact with Winnick, which is again he's not unaware
of aspects of this that he definitely knows about. Aspects
of this precisely what he knows about is a little
hard to say, right, because a lot of a lot

(14:16):
of who Bog is communicating with directly is like the
guy one step below the CEO.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Right. The fact that any of this made it into
an email tells you that Bog didn't know what he.

Speaker 1 (14:28):
Was doing, right, of course, he's the worst at this.
It's unbelievably stupid, like shoddy.

Speaker 2 (14:33):
I know, not to put that stuff in an email
that now somebody can recover that somebody like that's going
to come out, especially again, good God, in a work
email account.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
Yeah it's yeah, it's it is. Yeah, it's unbelievable stuff.
So Bob followed this up with a campaign of harassment
against Fido Master's Twitter account, despite the fact that his
vaunted analyst team hadn't been able to uncover the account
owner's name from the New York Times quote, fido Master
received an unsolicited message from a new Twitter user calling

(15:04):
herself Marissa. Her picture showed her to be about twenty five.
Claiming to be a former eBay employee. She said she
possessed extremely damaging videos of executives misbehaving and wanted help
passing them to the Steiners. So they're like, will prove
that this guy is working with the Steiners by reaching
out to her and saying, we have like embarrassing videos

(15:25):
of eBay executives behaving badly, and we think you can
get these to the Steiners. So she's trying to fish
for fido Master to acknowlogy. Yeah, I know them. Fido
Master is like, well, it looks like miss Steiner has
a public email address for her public website. If you
want to get something to her, you should probably go
to her. I don't know her. Marissa's like, well, how

(15:46):
about it if I leave the videos on a thumb
drive at a hotel in the city of your choice
and you can deliver them to the Steiners. And photo
Master's like, well, no, that sounds incredibly shady. Why would
I ever do that? I don't know these people? What
is wrong with you? The wilder here suggestions got, the
more Phido Master resisted because whoever's running this account is

(16:08):
clearly like has above a room temperature IQ and it's
just like, well, no, so I don't know what's going on,
because no one would guess that what's going on is
what's going on here. But he has enough to know, like, no,
I'm not going to do a dead drop of a
bunch of videos for you random person on Twitter who
thinks I know this lady. So he starts suggesting, just like, hey,

(16:30):
get a lawyer, Like, if you're worried that you'll be
harassed or attacked for having this information, like, talk to
a lawyer. I can't help you now. Marissa is in reality,
played by two of Bog's angels. As you may have
guessed by now, Bog's policy of hiring hot chicks did
not lead to him having a team that had particularly
good spy credentials. Veronica Zee, one of the young women

(16:51):
who played Marissa, had only used eBay once before being hired.
She had studied criminology in college, but had no relevant
job experience when she was hired at age twenty three,
And criminology degrees don't actually make people like tell people
how to carry out criminal espionage. That's not really like

(17:11):
why you get that degree. It's mainly to learn, well,
it's mainly to learn a lot of misinformation about blood
spatter and DNA. But like that's that's kind of beside
the point for now.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
In shure, it's not sexist for us to point out
that his criteria for hiring these women was probably no.

Speaker 1 (17:30):
Like that they're just all young women. No, no, no, no, no,
it's just that like they don't I'm not saying that
they're dumb. I don't get that feeling. They just don't
have any experience committing illegal harassment campaigns, right, Like, they
don't have any kind of relevant job experience to this.
Like they're just ladies that he was attracted to and
he hired to stalk some strangers and they're not very

(17:51):
good at this, right, Like that's kind of the point.
But yeah, this is not like I think any I
will say, just based on how Jim and his former
police captain perform if they had hired a bunch of
men who thought that they would be really good at spies.
I don't think they would have been more competent in
this job because it's a dumb thing to be doing,

(18:13):
and no one was going to do this job very well.
So I should emphasize here that the unhinged paranoia and
rage over the Steiners and Fido Master was not just
contained to the CEO and his chief of security. On
June twenty fifth, twenty nineteen, Chief of Communication Steve Weimer
texted two eBay Communications employees about an e Commerce Fits

(18:33):
article that mildly noted some issues EBA had with a competitor.
The executive stated he could not complain about the article,
but then added, crazily love it when a secret we
can't speak it out loud plan comes together, and then
like a winking emoji and added we always reserve the
right to go zero to sixty and get crazy on
her ass. But this is a huge adjustment the last

(18:55):
month ever since the Walker's post, which is the post
about that bar that got created. So again they are
just putting this shit in messages right Like Steve Weimer is,
you know, part of the c suite. He's the chief
of Communications. He is the guy that Winnig is talking
to and then Wymer is communicating very directly with Bog
about all of the crimes that they're committing, and he's

(19:17):
just like emailing back and forth like I love our
secret plan. I can't wait to go zero to sixty
and get crazy on her ass.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
And where's the voice of reason in this? Like this
has to be a corporate culture thing. Yeah, this is
why you can't whoever, I know not everybody's going to
go down for this, but it's weird how nobody involved
is like, are we talking about the same thing? Are
you talking about the lady that the blogs about, the

(19:49):
the e sales seeing you guys are all yelling about
you're really mad about something? Which poster? Are you really?
I guess I missed it. I saw her like briefly
mentioned It's like, no, that's the one. We need to
fling her into a volcano.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, this lady is our al Qaeda, Like we are
doing a war on terror against her.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
It's so weird. There was something there with their corporate
with their corporate culture that was so weird.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
It's a mix of I think you don't question the CEO,
you don't question the executives, above you, and they don't
question the people above them. So when you have a
guy like Winnig, who I think is just a really
insecure person who's not used to any kind of criticism.
You know, he's kind of born rich. He gets to
become a CEO at age twenty three because his dad

(20:43):
had had the job. I think he's just kind of
a petty person who's not very secure, And when you
have this kind of corporate culture that is so personality driven,
his characteristics get sort of filtered out to become characteristics
of how the company operates, both in terms of who

(21:03):
he hires, which are people that he feels sympatico with
and they feel pressured to act in ways that you
know are going to be pleasing to him. I really
do think a lot of it comes down to that.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
I hope I'm not just beating a dead horse here,
because this is somebody who has lived in public is
running an internet company. I mean, how old were you
the first time somebody a stranger on the internet threatened
violence against you for something you had readen or said.

Speaker 1 (21:32):
Probably the first time I had a cracked article published,
you know, when I was like nineteen, Yeah, maybe idear
in arguments on something awful. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, yeah, And they didn't invent the Internet until I
was in my twenties. But it was within the first
month of me getting my first Aol account that somebody
told me they wanted me to die or they're going
to come to my house and kill me, because of
a joke I had made. Like, I'm not condoning that behavior.
I'm just saying, if you or if you live in
the public eye on the Internet, and you and I

(22:03):
have been now been doing it for most of our lives,
that's just the way. That's the noise the Internet makes
at you. It's people telling you so the idea that
he is so hyper sensitive to criticism, I don't know
how you can live to be aged twelve in the
Internet era without having a thick skin about people calling

(22:24):
you all sorts of names. The fact that this person
lived to adulthood and lived in the public eye and
ran an Internet company one of the biggest names online
and was not used to trolls or whatever, and so
to the point that this incredibly mild criticism just sets
them all off. I even now you've told me every

(22:45):
detail of this of the history, I still can't wrap
my head around it.

Speaker 1 (22:50):
I think it's because derangement is progressive and it is
like it's a like the derangement is like the pace
at which it can proceeds is accelerated by your access
to power, right, Because that number one, it removes your
accountability and it's it's it's kind of like how if

(23:13):
you only ever encounter cocaine at parties. You might do
cocaine at a couple of parties, but if you have
a big bag of cocaine, you will go from when
I do cocaine, I do a line of it to
I am doing cocaine every hour of every day until
my heart explodes. Right, Because you just like and that
I think power like number one, there actually is some
like psychological science behind this, Like power is addictive in

(23:38):
ways that you can see if you just look at
the trajectory of a guy like Elon Musk. But it
also like I think this amount of wealth and power,
I think winning becomes less rational every month that he
is doing this, right, And I think that is true
of a lot of people if they don't have I
think there are ways to protect yourself from this. One

(23:59):
of the ways that you can protect your whole organization
from this is by having safeguards and structures in it
that are meant to add accountability and check power of
even the executives. Right Like, when you actually have functional safeguards,
it reduces the degree that you get deranged like this.
But eBay clearly doesn't have anything like that set up,
and so Winnig is just and everyone below him is

(24:21):
just spiraling. You know, That's really what this story is about.
And we'll talk more about their spiraling, but first listen
to our sponsors spiral on the ads. We're back. So
a month or two after Steve Weimer, chief of Communications,

(24:45):
sends that message to some of his employees about going
crazy on ENA's ass in August first of twenty nineteen,
that New York Times published an article about a lawsuit
EBA had filed against Amazon for unlawfully poaching sellers. In
ENA's coverage of this article, she wrote about Winnig, saying
that he has quote been unable to stop at a

(25:06):
cline in market sales and that his plan to staunch
the bleeding by suing Amazon may not be the best tactic. Again,
she's a very modestly spoken person, not a firebrand. But
Winnig is.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
To a comical degree, right, like every quote you read
from her, it's.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
Yeah, it's it's remarkable. But Winnig, hearing this very reasonable statement,
immediately texts Steve Weimer, saying, Ina is out with a
hot piece on the litigation. If we are ever going
to take her down, now is the time? Why? Why
is now the time? How is that going to help you?
Devin Winnig. So you should note here that Winnig does

(25:49):
not order his underlings or anyone else to commit a crime.
He just says, if we're going to take her out,
we should do it now. Right, And Winnig's successful defense
of himself in this case hinges a lot on that.
Now Weimer his communications guy, who is I should note
the son and grandson of Baptist pastors. That's going to
be relevant. In the second repeats winnigs statement to Bog

(26:13):
Like Weimer. After Winnigs says this, if we're going to
take her out, we got to do it now, Weymer
messages Jim Bogg and says, this hatred is a sin
I am very sinful. Bog responds, let me ask you this,
do we need her entire site? Shut down. I'm not
fucking around here anymore. And Weimer responds, Amen, I want

(26:33):
her done. Bog says so and so that's that part
is censored. Said to burn her to the ground. Correct,
and Weimer responds, she is a biased troll who needs
to get all caps burned down. These are we have
like a direct copies of the text messages, so it
sounds like, you know, Weimer said, Hey, Winnig says we

(26:56):
can take her down now, and then he starts doing
all this biblical shit, hate your hatreds of sin, and
I'm very sinful, but we're going after her now. We're
gonna burn her down. And again, if your boss is
messaging you stuff like this, it's time to get another job,
like because you're going to get deposed about what he's
asking you to do.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
Unless he's talking about yes, let's go to legal and
see if we can get a cease and desist because
we think these claims are libelous or whatever. Yeah, because
I get it. Some some corporate people use language like
they're talking about going to war, We're gonna destroy it,
we're gonna burn it. But what they mean is we're
gonna call we're gonna get into a conference call with
the legal team and ask if we can send a

(27:36):
mean letter on lawyer letter head and see if that'll
scare her into shutting off her website like they use
the language they use, did not you know, wouldn't necessarily
convey to Let's send her a bloody pig mask now
spoiler alert.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
Ye for where this is heading. So Bog does a
yes and to Wimer's like, we need to burn her down,
and it's like, Okay, I'm gonna execute Plan B and
Whymer promises Bog, I will manage any bad fallout right now.
This conversation seems to be the first time that bog
laid out to a superior his theory that the fido
Master account was either run by ENA's wife or ENA's

(28:13):
husband David Steiner, or quote another close associate, and he
then lied about the success of the catfishing attempt that
his employees had already botched, telling Wimer, we have further
reason to believe he Fido Master is either her husband
or another close associate. I've been communicating with him every day.
I told him I have an incriminating video that he
needs to see. He bid on it hook line and sinker.

(28:35):
I want to leave it at a hotel concierge for him.
If I can get him to pick it up. His
ass is mine. It is not, and like he didn't.
At no point was he ever falling along with this.
Bog is just kind of lying to his boss to
pump up his own competence. But the fact that Weimer
is like, Yep, this seems like a good plan. This
seems like a thing eBay should be doing. Again, he's

(28:57):
directly under winning. So in early August, Ina published yet
another article about winnigs ever increasing salary. The article was
again a perfectly normal example of her reporting, but eBay
leadership treated it like a death threat. Winnig, who I
should note this very year twenty nineteen, was voted number
one hundred on Forbes's list of America's most innovative leaders,

(29:19):
sent out an email to his C suite executives demanding
answers to the crucial emergency of an old lady and
her husband writing blog posts.

Speaker 2 (29:27):
Per Yeah, at this point, does she even know they're
mad at them? I know she knows straight painted something
on her garage. It was inscrutable, But does she even
know that they're even reading her her website.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
She knows they're reading her website because she's influential in
the industry. She has sources who work at eBay who
feed her info, so she's aware that her stuff is read. Yeah,
but she has no idea that any of this is
going on.

Speaker 2 (29:54):
Because why would you ever think?

Speaker 1 (29:56):
No one would assume this. This is crazy. For what
happens next, I'm going to quote from CBS News is
write up here. eBay's chief communications officer, Steve Weimer wrote back,
we are going to crush this lady. About a month later, Winnick,
the CEO of eBay, texted, take her down, prosecutors say.
Steve Weimer later texted eBay security director Jim Bogg, I

(30:17):
want to see ashes as long as it takes whatever
it takes, which is a little further than like using
a war metaphor. Right now, bog sweating over Elliott management
scrutiny of corporate operations and eager to justify the expenses
of his branch of the company, leapt into action. He
shared Weimer's I want to see Ashes message with his

(30:39):
deputy David Harville, and added, I've been ordered to find
and destroy. Now all of this is really bad stuff
to have in writing if you are planning to commit
a bunch of crimes. But they apparently don't teach you that.
In the CIA, despite the graffiti, stalking, and phishing attempts,
neither the Steiners nor Fido Master had stopped their dastardly
behavior of right mean things about eBay. In email conversations, Winnig, Weimer,

(31:04):
and Bog lost their minds over the fact that Twitter
refused to remove Phido Master's account after they complained about it. Finally,
Weimer concluded an early August email by saying, this issue
gives me ulcers, harms employee morale, and trickles into everything
about our brand. I genuinely believe these people are acting
out of malice. In anything all caps we can do

(31:25):
to solve it should be explored Somewhere. At some point,
someone shows to let this slide. It has grown to
a point that is absolutely unacceptable. It's the blind eye
towards graffiti that turns into Mayhem syndrome, and I'm sick
about it. Whatever period it period takes period. So at
this point Bog has been told several times do literally

(31:45):
anything to stop these people, and he decides he responds
by asking, do I have permission to neutralize ENA's website?
I think I can do it in two weeks or less,
and Weimer again responds by saying, whatever it takes. So
what Bog takes from this is that I should sign
the Steiner's personal email accounts up for a bunch of
porn newsletters and other newsletters as well. He signs them

(32:08):
up for sin City Fetish Night, the Satanic Temples newsletter,
and the Communist Party newsletter for some reason, and then
Bog's chief aid, missus Pop, posts the Steiner's home address
on Twitter. This is the point at which the Steiners
may start to realize something's weird, like how do people
have our address? What the hell is going on? But again,
probably just think it's trolls and don't reckon that. Realize

(32:31):
certainly that all of these trolls are just one or
two people at eBay operating a bunch of burner accounts.
So miss if.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
Somebody signed me up for a bunch of newsletters and
mailing lists, I would not notice whatsoever. That public Gmail
I use or the public inbox is just an ocean.
It's all breathing bought. So suddenly I'm getting something from
like the whatever they sign them up for a bunch
of porn stuff or whatever. Just like, yeah, that's that's

(33:00):
what my inbox looks like, Yeah, that's all. Yeah, there
is this actually less porn spam than what I had
last week. All right, we're getting better.

Speaker 1 (33:09):
Yeah, like yeah, like every red blooded American, my email
inbox is a mix of porn spam and price alerts
on Ammo. So yeah, like that's that's just kind of
the norm. So Miss Pop, who gets really into her
job stocking these people, sets up a Burner account with
a profile picture of a skull and pretends to be
an eBay seller who is angry at Ena Steiner for

(33:31):
hurting his business. She messages a bunch and Ina, being intelligent,
ignores the messages until Pop writes, I guess I'm going
to have to get your attention another way, bitch. What
followed is described later in the court case against bog
Pop and the rest of the eBay skulldugery team is
ordering quote, unwanted and scary items and services to the

(33:53):
Steiner's home, and ordering items intended to embarrass the Steiners
to their neighbor's addresses. Now that leaves out a lot
of context, and in an interview with CBS News, Ina elaborates, quote,
somebody left a voicemail for us saying they couldn't fulfill
the order for a wet specimen. And David was the
one who called, and he said, what is a wet specimen?

(34:14):
And it was a pig fetus. That's when I really
my heart sank because I thought who might be angry
at something I wrote? And I couldn't figure it out.
I mean, we were desperately trying to think who could
it be, because you would never guess it's the CEO
of eBay Sam through a complicated process, whose underlings are
sending me a pig fetus, because only a crazy person

(34:37):
would assume that.

Speaker 2 (34:39):
And also that this guy thinks it's like in a
horror movie where the box is going to show up
on the door and she's going to open it up
and there's just going to be like a dead, slimy
pig fetus in there, where in reality it's like, well no,
there's all sorts of procedures ye specifically to stop this
from happening, because of course every weirdo is trying to
send his x Y a pig fetus, like the company

(35:01):
that sells that stuff to whatever science classrooms, whatever, Like, yeah,
that's like forty percent of their orders, I'm sure, as
weirdos trying to send it just to an enemy. So yeah,
they've got a thing where they're gonna call the recipient
and say, hey, you know, we've got a procedure for
shipping these. Do you have a lab or whatever?

Speaker 1 (35:21):
Right, and do you want a pig fetus?

Speaker 2 (35:24):
Yeah? Do you actually want to pig fetus or are
you one of the most of our orders? Whereas some
some freak trying to send it to somebody they're they're
angry at.

Speaker 1 (35:32):
It does show the very like Hollywood movie understanding of
how reality works, where it's like, yeah, we'll just have
a pig fate fetus maled to them. We're like, no,
that's not how these Someone is going to contact them
to ask if they want to take delivery of like
dead animal parts, Like, they don't just drop that off
in front of your house in an unmarked package. You

(35:53):
have to do that yourself if you want to male
people dead animal bits. Trust me, I have done it anyway.
I did. Jason one time from a fan receive an
enormous pint glass filled with like penis stones from like
animals that get like built calcium build ups inside their
urinary tracts. There's like an elephant one in there that's
the size of like a fucking almost the size of

(36:14):
a pool queue. So, but that was someone who liked me.
I don't know why they sent that, but it's nice
to have.

Speaker 2 (36:22):
Oh, to be clear, there's nothing I could receive in
a package that would make me think somebody hated me.
If somebody sent me a dead rat, i'e immediately think, yeah,
I think, I think I put this in a book.
This must be a reference to something that happened in
one of the books.

Speaker 1 (36:36):
It's clearly a fan.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Yeah, it's a sprobably fan. And somebody at last Christmas
sent me some some cookies and I ate them like
it's probably fine like that. They surely don't want me dead,
they probably yeah, yeah, So no, I didn't didn't think
twice about it. No, And it's just so.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
Strange, Ina, you know, they're just kind of baffled by
the pig feetus thing. But then on August tenth, at four,
a package containing a pig masked mask soaked in blood
arrives at the Steiner house. They received a Twitter DM
minutes later in all caps, saying do I have your
attention now?

Speaker 2 (37:13):
Now?

Speaker 1 (37:13):
The good news is that David and Nina had called
the police to make a report about the weird shit
that they were receiving, and an officer is on site
as the pig mask arrives. So I can tell you
from experience, having both had to report to police when
I have gotten death threats and who have tried to
walk people through it when they have been stalked by

(37:34):
different kind of terrorist groups, it is it can be
hard to get police to take cases like this seriously.
Online stalking and harassment often sounds like a joke until
it isn't. The Steiners are kind of lucky in that
there is an officer on scene when they receive the
package with this mask and the Twitter message, and the

(37:54):
cop both sees that as it's happening, and he sees
how scared they are and immediately is like, oh, this
is probably a serious issue, Like this is actually something
that we might need to deal with. So they get
kind of lucky there and the police start working, you know,
to their credit, they actually are really on the ball
in this specific case, and while they did that, Bog

(38:15):
and his team escalated their attacks on the Steiner family,
livid to the point of insanity that for all this
they still hadn't stopped blogging. So Bog sends the Steiners
the copy of a book titled Grief Diaries Surviving the
Loss of a Spouse, and then he sends them a
funeral wreath. Both Steiners at this point take this as
a death threat, and they do you give you an

(38:36):
idea what it is, because it is and because people
are messaging them saying you're going to die if you
don't stop doing this. So to give you an idea
of how seriously they take this, they start sleeping in
separate beds so that if they're attacked in the night,
one of them has a chance to get away. So
this is not like like that's at that point you're
doing psychological damage to people, right Like, this is not

(38:58):
just like weird any silly like harassment anymore. This is
has crossed into being a very serious crime. Now, along
with the threats to life in Lim came a dizzying
barrage of pornography and insects. They repeatedly sent eBay repeatedly
or security people at eBay repeatedly sent copies of a
barely legal addition of hustler that was like, just turned eighteen,

(39:22):
look at this hot barely eighteen girl, right, And they
mailed it not to the Steiners but to their neighbors,
but addressed to David Steiner. I think to try and
convince his wife that he was looking at barely legal
pornography but didn't know his own home address. I'm not
really sure how she hoped this, or maybe to convince
the neighbors of the Steiners that David was into barely

(39:44):
legal pornography. It's a little unclear to me how the
best case scenario for this caper.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
Yeah, it's supposed to be like embarrass them with the neighbors.
And I'm just imagining a husband and wife at the
neighbor's house and the woman is like, oh my gosh, this.
I think that the guy, the man living extra him,
I think he might be looking at pornography, and the
dude just like, yes, that is a shocking thing. Yeah,

(40:13):
to accuse a man of.

Speaker 1 (40:15):
I have had a neighbor admit to me to being intovar,
which is like pooring of like being an animal that's
eaten by other anthropomorphic animals like this is the eighteen
year old, barely legal issue of Hustler does not even like,
does not cross the boundary of being like I would
be worried if a neighbor got this at their house.

Speaker 2 (40:36):
The freakiest part is that he's still doing like analog
magazine porn. That's like the most perfect thing. I can
imagine that you're you paid like like eight dollars for
a like twenty three photos in it.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
Yeah, Like, all right, David, could you come over here.
We're not angry, We're not angry, but I just wanted
to do you know about the internet? Can I Can
I walk you through this thing? Because there's a lot
of options besides having a Hustler maga mailed to your
house today. Actually, yeah, anyway, it doesn't work, but you
know it does work Jason advertising theoretically. Anyway, here's ants

(41:16):
and we're back. So, in addition to copies of the
barely legal issue of Hustler, the like Boggs team starts
mailing fly Larva, live spiders, and boxes of cockroaches to
the Steiner home. Now at this point, the police set
up cameras to survey, like what's happening, you know, for
obvious reasons, but this only provides them footage at first,

(41:39):
with bewildered delivery drivers shipping out insects, porn, and funeral
supplies online. Mis Pop continued her harassment of Ina, as
this section from The New York Times describes the Twitter bombardment,
began to hint at violence. When you hurt our business,
you hurt our families. People will do anything to protect
family for exclamation points again not even clear because they're

(42:02):
not like highlighting this article, you did hurt my business
because INA's articles are not damaging the business of random
eBay people. Right, So all of this is just completely,
completely incomprehensible. And one of the things that is noted
in that New York Times article is that while all
of these unhinged messages and packages are being sent to

(42:24):
the Steiners. On his own Twitter account, mister Weimer evoked
Fred Rogers. He said a movie about the inspirational TV
personality made him cry, and he once retweeted mister Rogers's
line that if there's anything that bothers me, it's one
person demeaning another. But inside eBay, mister Weimer was goading
the harassment on I want to see ashes, he told

(42:47):
mister Ball on August eleventh, as long as it takes,
whatever it takes. Mister Baugh shared the message with his deputy,
David Harville, adding I've been ordered to find and destroy.
The next escalation in eBay's war on the Steiners was
to fly Bog and one of his analysts, missus miss Ze,
first class, to Boston, where the Steiners lived. They checked

(43:08):
in at the Ritz and drove to the Steiner's home
to install a GPS device on their car. Alas Bog's
CEA CIA techniques were stemied by the unforseeable fact that
the Steiners used their garage as a garage. They were
not prepared for this. Who would be planting a GPS
device on someone's car because they wrote criticisms of eBay

(43:29):
is a crime on its own. But Bog knows the
key to being a good criminal is to never just
commit a couple of crimes at once. You want to
max out your crime yield so that the police get
overwhelmed by the density of illegality and shut down. Right.
That's that's how you beat the cops, is you just
committed the Trumps method. It does actually work for some people. Yes,

(43:51):
Jim's just a little bit below that level of wealth
that he can't quite make it. So Jim buys a
crowbar to break into the Steiner's garaz alas for him
and his team. They get spotted by the cops. So
at this point had set up surveillance of the Steiner
home and they hear through this Gilbert, the police captain
they're working with on the ground in Boston, here's through

(44:14):
an internet feed of the local police radio that like
the police are going to send a team over to
the Steiner house. So they decide to stop temporarily their
physical acts against Steiner property. But they did decide to
order seventy dollars worth of pizza from a twenty four
hour pizzeria and have it sent to the Steiners at
four point thirty in the morning. So for the next

(44:35):
couple of days they continue with this juvenile shit. They
put up advertisements for estate sales at the Steiner residence.
They put up like a Craigslist post advertising a swinger
party there and say ring the doorbell any time of
day or night, which shows a real swinger parties don't
work like that. You don't just see a Craigslist for
a random sex party at a person you don't know's

(44:55):
house and just show up. Maybe people did before HIV,
but that not the way the world works anymore.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
Primarily, what was I never in the stuff I read?
I never understood what was the end goal of trying
to put the tracker on the vehicle was? What was
the point of that? What were they trying to find
out or what?

Speaker 1 (45:16):
I think they were trying to get proof that Ena
was traveling to meet with Fido Master, and they were
hoping that they would find her drive to him, and
then they could prove who Fido Master was and bring
down their whole criminal enterprise of being mean about eBay
on the internet. I don't I don't have a way

(45:37):
to make it make better sense to you than that.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
Because he booked a flight to go do this like,
that's a that's a meeting, that's a discussion, that's a
paper trail, that's we're going here to do. We have
goals to accomplish with this trip and what they did
once they were there. I'm not saying because they didn't
have a plan, It's just I can't figure out what

(46:00):
the plan was because again, all of this, I assume
is just to try to intimidate this couple into taking
their website down. But so far you've not even made
it clear that that's what you want them to do.

Speaker 1 (46:13):
Yeah, it's you're just trying to scare them away from posting.
But at no point have they received like a set
of demands. Because I know, if.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
You send me a box of bugs and you want
me to piece together what I'm supposed.

Speaker 1 (46:25):
To what am I supposed to do as a result
of these bugs? Which of my activities do you want
me to stop or do you think I need bugs?

Speaker 2 (46:35):
Or which specific Like you've not made it clear you're
implying that a specific person because again they're not saying, hey,
we're here from eBay. It's kind of implied this is
on behalf of somebody else. So it's like, well, is
there a specific article you want me to take down?
Is there any traction you want me to post? What
did I do to giving them anything actionable?

Speaker 1 (46:56):
That's again this is a very like such a comprehensively
incompetent effort, and part of you know, you can really
see the incompetence in the fact that so while they're
kind of waiting around. They get scared off from breaking
into the garage, but they keep showing up and doing
physical surveillance of the property because they don't have any
better ideas. While they're doing this kind of petty harassment,

(47:16):
And one day when they drive, when they're like stalking
them in a rental car, David Steiner gets a photo
out of his window of their rental car and he
sends it to the police, and the next time they
show up, an obvious undercover police car is parked out
by the house. Now, if I were doing this for
some reason, I would be like, oh shit, we've been made.
We should probably stop doing this.

Speaker 2 (47:36):
Right.

Speaker 1 (47:36):
The police are taking this seriously and we clearly don't
know what we're doing. But bogg sends a WhatsApp message
to his colleagues gloating they're seeing ghosts now. Lol, We've
trapped them into having the police out in front of
their house. They're so scared at all we did was
threatened to murder them. We've got them jumping in shadows.

(47:59):
Now are not seeing ghosts, they are seeing obvious criminal activity.
And the police have seen that activity now too, and
filmed it several times. A Natick. Detective who's trying to
Natick is like the suburb or whatever of Boston where
this is all happening, figures out what's going on, and
he tracks the payment for the pizzas that had been
sent to the Steiner's house because they had to pay

(48:21):
for some of them, and they found out that the
pizzas had been paid for with a debit gift debit
card purchased in Silicon Valley, within a couple miles of
eBay corporate headquarters. The rental cars were also traced directly
back to Bog's team, who were all eBay employees. Bog
the CIA man had taken virtually no precautions to protect

(48:43):
their identity from the New York Times quote. On August
twenty first, the detective showed up at the Ritz Carlton
to see miss After miss Z dodged him, the detective
called her phone as mister Bog was hustling her to
the airport. Mister Bog answered, pretended he was her husband,
and played dumb. Miss Z's flight was not for hours,
so they got a hotel room at the airport to

(49:03):
hide out. Mister Bogg sat on the couch and played
a clip from the two thousand and three comedy Old School,
in which a husband answers the door to a fellow
who says, I'm here for the gang Bang. He kept
watching it over and over and laughing, telling miss Z
to lighten up.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
I feel like some listeners, because the nature of this show,
are waiting for us to get to the point where
the eBay execu you know, like have this couple killed.
We never get there. If the story had just been
this person wrote a bunch of stuff that eBay thought
was financially damaging, and they had hired a hitman to
have them murdered, I wouldn't have brought the story to

(49:42):
you because that's the kind of thing you think goes on.
This is so stupid and juvenile and weird. That's what
draw me to the story, because it's not just what
they did. Is this is not the most evil thing.

Speaker 1 (49:57):
We've heard about inside on this show, but it is.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:01):
I think it is illustrative of a thought process that
in other organizations does lead to worse things. Right like this,
this kind of escalation of derangement and escalation of force
is not irrelevant if you're kind of concerned about how
people with power use it to hurt other people. Right,
This is just a particularly absurd example of that. I

(50:25):
think is a good way to look at it.

Speaker 2 (50:27):
There's so many things at play here, because there's just
the corporate culture, and there's this weird group think, and
there's this way these guys are all egging each other on,
and the way the paranoia, the type of corporate paranoia
that you see with Elon Musk, Right, he seems convinced
that every rando on Twitter is capable of taking him down.
That guy who's like, you know what's posting the location

(50:49):
of his private plane, He's like, well, they're trying to
get me killed. They're trying to assassinate me. And it's
this weird type of madness that people who are not
acclimated to Twitter, I guess, or to the Internet somehow.
It's a type of madness. And I'm fascinated by this
because the outcome is exactly plays exactly the way if

(51:11):
there's like a Danny McBride movie about, yes, this type
of he.

Speaker 1 (51:15):
Would be the perfect guy to cast as Jim in this.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
Where the guys like evil but also dumb, and he's
not harmless, but like if they had broken into that garage,
and if she had caught them in the garage, I
don't know what would have happened. The guy was going
to go in with a crowbar.

Speaker 1 (51:29):
He probably had a gun. We have to assume this
guy probably carries a gun with them.

Speaker 2 (51:34):
All.

Speaker 1 (51:35):
He's got a police captain with him too, so that
guy could have had a piece, you know.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
And he's you know, and he thinks he's been given
blank check to burn this person down. Like anything, anything
in all caps beats it over and over again, you'd
do anything that's so weird. It's so weird.

Speaker 1 (51:52):
I do think you actually nailed the casting though. Danny
McBride is exactly who you'd want for this.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
Oh, I've been picturing him all along.

Speaker 1 (51:59):
Yeah, everything, everything.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
He says, like the way he's so over the top
dramatic and takes himself so seriously there, but there's such
like every idea he has is like some people described
Andy McBride's acting as like a child suddenly in an
adult's body.

Speaker 1 (52:16):
Yeah, and it is like that, right where like that
you have been caught by the cops. You are now
subject to a serious criminal investigation, and you are just
playing the same clip from old school over and over
again as you hide.

Speaker 2 (52:29):
In a hotel like and laughing and laughing you.

Speaker 1 (52:32):
Worked for the CIA anyway, Once it became clear that
they were now the ones being watched, Bog had his
people embark on a half assed cover up. He gave
orders for his team to try again. The way places
his brain goes are marvelous, so he knows they've been
blown up. He knows that the cops are looking at
who was ordering these pizzas and who is operating this

(52:55):
burner account that's actually making the threats, because clearly that
person is involved the deliveries, because the threats are time
with the deliveries now because the fake name mis Pop
had used for that burner account was a Samoan name,
Jim Bogg says, you need to go find a Samoan
that we can blame for all this. That'll that'll throw
them off the case. Now. My favorite of Bog's CIA

(53:22):
specials was his attempt to have his team make fake
dossier's slandering the Steiners and hand those over to the police.
From the US Attorney's charging document Honor about August fifteenth,
twenty nineteen, Bog directed Stockwell by a WhatsApp message to
prepare an eBay person of interest report that listed the
Steiners as EBA's top persons of interest. Bog wrote in

(53:43):
the narrative, I need you to write that they have
made direct threats to eBay, eBay CEO and our employees
in parentheses, make it up, trying to say just lie
about them, Just lie about them, pretend there are top threats.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
Puts that in writing.

Speaker 1 (53:59):
Yeah, brilliant. Now while they're trying to cover up an
ongoing criminal investigation. Stephanie Pop continued harassing the Steiners on Twitter.
On the night of August twenty first, she used three
separate Twitter accounts she had created the night before to
fake a public conversation about the steiners many crimes. One
account asked another for Ena Steiner's home address, the other

(54:22):
account posted it, while the other replied, guess I have
to pay Ena a visit. Pop forwarded the tweets that
she had just written to Bog, her boss, and Gilbert,
the retired police captain, and wrote, ENA's really bringing out
some angry Twitter users. One of the mysteries here is
like what's going on with you, Stephanie? Like are you

(54:42):
really angling for a promotion? Because you are you are
putting way too much effort into this job.

Speaker 2 (54:49):
And again, where's the same where's the voice of reason
anywhere in the vicinity.

Speaker 1 (54:55):
Of this That voice bounced a while back, not.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
To say, hey, what we're doing is wrong, but to say, hey,
what we're doing is only this only ends one way,
with multiple ones of us going to jail. Like you understand,
I don't care how mad you are at this, lady, Like,
what we're doing is not going to be effected. It's
not going to accomplish our goals as a corporation.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
That's the thing. Not even like what we're doing is wrong,
but just like this is clearly not worked. We have
gone as far as we can go without committing violence,
and it has not dissuaded them. And also now the
cops are investigating. Stop tweeting about them, stop tweeting threats
to them. But the same day that Pop fakes that

(55:41):
Twitter conversation, Bog has Gilbert execute what he called their
White Night strategy, which is their last ditch attempt to
deflect blame for what they'd done. In this they have eBay,
another chunk of the company, contact the Steiners to offer
help about their ongoing harassment problems and also reach out
as EBA to the cops and say, hey, we can

(56:04):
help you with this investigation if you want. Genius. So
Gilbert is the guy who sits down with the cops
because he's a former police captain, and he claims falsely
not to know any members of the eBay security team
that the cops know by name and know by name
we're stalking the Steiners. When Gilbert learns that Natick police

(56:25):
are investigating that prepaid debit card, he tells Bog, and
Bog orders the team to cook up a list of
eBay persons of interest in the Bay that they could
pin the crime on. Basically, anyone in Silicon Valley who's
been mean at us on the internet. We can try
and make it look like they sent the pizzas to
these this random couple in Boston. Very believable. Gilbert dutifully

(56:48):
handed over this list of persons of interest to the
Natick police, who then interrogated him and another eBay employee
about Stephanie Pop and Veronica Z. Gilbert claimed that Pop
had ordered Z to investigate the Steiners on her own,
So at this point he's trying to throw them under
the bus and make it look like it's just these
two crazy gals, right, Pop, But this is.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
Where you should be at this point, right where everyone
in eBay should be is like, Okay, how do I
make it look like I had nothing to do with this?
In the lone ear goes down for.

Speaker 1 (57:20):
This right right. And obviously Pop especially is out of
pocket on this, but they didn't start this. Right now,
Pop does not help her case though, by continuing to
harass the Steiners through Twitter, posting this On August twenty second,
the Gay Day, Gilbert met with the Natick police and
she like cites their newsletters Twitter account twenty years of

(57:43):
lies and destroying families. Don't be proud of that, you
worthless bitch. I will destroy your family and business too,
see how you like it? And then in another message,
when are we gonna visit her in Natick? Question mark?
Question mark? Question mark? And she spells all of this
and just just the a way people don't actually even

(58:03):
type on the Internet. But I feel like that's that's
almost punching down at this point. Now, by this stage
in the degradation of this whole case, what's happening has
finally reached eBay's legal team, and these are finally the
first time anyone at eBay who is an intelligent person
finds out what Jim and his team have been doing

(58:25):
at the we'll say suggestion maybe, but not in a
legally binding way of the CEO and eBay as lawyers go,
what the fuck you have been doing?

Speaker 3 (58:36):
What?

Speaker 2 (58:37):
How much money would you pay to be able to
magically transport yourself to the room in the moment they
found out fully what had been happening.

Speaker 1 (58:47):
Priceless, just beautiful. Yeah, I would look house.

Speaker 2 (58:54):
To be able to go just see them, see this
room full of lawyers for this whatever twenty billion dollar corporation,
and have it explained fully what exactly had been done,
including with emails you sent them spiders, expensed rental cars.

Speaker 1 (59:14):
Flights, Yeah, you had a cop spray paint what on
their house? Oh?

Speaker 2 (59:21):
Because you thought what?

Speaker 1 (59:23):
Because?

Speaker 2 (59:24):
Explain to me again why you you thought this was
Oh Jesus, I can't.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
A legal team starts to ship bricks and they also
start asking questions of Bog and Bog panics and he
calls Wimer, who is the communications like secretary. He's the
like the one step down from the CEO. Right, he's
the guy that Winnig is usually complaining to, and he's
Bog's like person of contact on the c suite. So
Jim leaves this message on Wimer's cell phone after the

(59:52):
lawyers reach out to him. Hi, Wimer, this is Jim
Bog's personal self. My team ran an op on our
friend in Boston. Nothing illegal occurred, and we were actually
intending to team up with her and get her on
our side in a positive manner. However, small town police
got a couple rental car plates and tracked it back
to my people and the hotel we were staying at.

(01:00:12):
They sent a note to eBay Investigations, who then passed
it to legal and they are conducting an internal investigation
on us. We are cooperating, but I know they realize
something is off. We will continue to cooperate, but not
sure how long we can keep this up. If there
is any way to get some top cover, that would
be great. If not, I just wanted you to have
a head up because they are aware that multiple members
of our team are not a fan of that website,

(01:00:34):
to include David and his wife. Again, no crime was
committed and the local police don't have a case. I
don't want our legal team to give them one. Let
me know if you want to discuss this weekend, you
want to get that message from you here again, can't
emphasize enough. No crimes were committed. We wanted to get
them on our side with the spiders that we sent them.

Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
The level of sophistication. Ry thinks. I know what's going
to throw the cops off. I'm gonna send a message
stating that we didn't do a crime.

Speaker 1 (01:01:04):
No crimes were committed. Yeah, amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:01:08):
They will cancel the investigation when they hear that. Yeah.
Oh no, guys, No, no, he said they didn't do
any crimes. Yeah, we owe him an apology. I just
heard the message. No he said they didn't.

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
Yeah, we repeatedly said no crimes were committed. Could not
have been clear about that.

Speaker 3 (01:01:25):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:01:25):
From this point on, the game was up. A flurry
of deletions of text messages followed, right alongside messages from
the company legal counsel not to do that. Please, for
the love of God, don't delete your messages. That will
just make all this worse. Please stop committing crimes now.
Mister Winnig, the CEO, had been smart enough to avoid

(01:01:46):
giving any direct orders to carry out illegal acts in
a way that we can prove, or at least he
had been vague enough to give his extremely expensive lawyers
the wiggle room they needed. I can't. I have no
evidence that he committed any kind of crime. He has
not been convicted of a crime, no evidence that he
personally had anything deleted. He was, however, implicated in aspects
of the breaking scandal in a way that I think

(01:02:07):
we have adequately laid out here, right. And so when
all of this comes out, and this starts becoming the
news articles that you read and then sent me a
message saying you should do this as an episode, it
has become clear to everybody Devin Winning can't stay CEO
of eBay. He resigns later that same month with an
exit pay package of fifty seven million dollars fair salary

(01:02:33):
for good word less. You know learned you wasted a
shitload of the company money on a bar, You lost
a bunch of market share to Amazon, You presided over
a company where the security guy carried out a spider crime,
and then you get fifty seven million to leave. Nice
work if you can get it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
To be clear, even if his role in all of
this had been to not even about the blog lady,
and to simply be oblivious to what his security team
was doing in his name, that would be enough to
get him fired, right, Yes, you would think so without
clear fifty seven million dollars in my opinion, So.

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
We don't get sued. He doesn't get fired. He resigns,
and he says that I'm not on the same page
as the board. Right, legally, this is not firing. Do
I think that what happened was the rich guy version
of getting fired? Sure, but not in a way that
he can sue me over saying, because Devin Winnigs seems

(01:03:37):
like he might be kind of the guy who does
some suing. Maybe not. Now, laylow Devon. That's a good
good advice for all you Devon's out there listening right now.
By the way, always lay low if you're a Devon. Anyway,
mister Wimer, who is one step below Winnick, gets caught.
He stays working for eBay for like another year. But

(01:03:58):
he he is the one we know deleted a bunch
of messages, and specifically he deleted messages between himself and
bog And who knows what those message may or may
not have implicated him or winning in, but Weimer is
fired after this becomes clear, and obviously massively disgraced. He
never has another Oh no, sorry. He went on to

(01:04:20):
run the Boys and Girls Club of Silicon Valley. My bad,
that's fine, That's probably the guy you want molding young minds,
though right seems like he'd be good at that. He
claims that he had no point, no idea what Bog
was really doing until the story broke, which I don't
consider very credible, but again, he is not criminally convicted

(01:04:40):
of anything. Bog and five other employees are initially charged
with cyber stocking and a couple of other different crimes
like interfering with an investigation. Some of the people charged,
like miss Z, are temporary employees who also immediately lose
their job with no severance, in addition to becoming functionally
unemployable as their careers are getting started. And these young

(01:05:01):
women that I actually do feel bad for, they did
get caught up to a degree where like you should
have known better, But they were very young, much younger
than Bog. You know, then certainly the C suites at
this company, and it sucks that they're the ones who
suffer the most from this, Right, because they are. They
are seriously fucked as a result of all this, and

(01:05:24):
they're not the ones that I think most of the
blame should actually land on, But that is where most
of the blame lands now. The attention drawn to the
case ensures that there are further charges. In July of
twenty twenty, almost a year after the story broke, another
eBay employee, Philip Cook, is also charged with cyberstalking. Cook
is a retired decorated police captain, the second police former

(01:05:48):
police officer involved in this series of crimes. In addition
to the CIA man, Cook.

Speaker 4 (01:05:53):
Had gotten yeah no comment, Yeah yeah, And he had
been one of these guys who got bored in retirement
decided to take private security jobs in the tech industry.

Speaker 1 (01:06:05):
He was brought on as senior manager of Security Operations
for eBay's Global security team, working directly under Jim Bogg.
His salary was one hundred and eighty five thousand dollars
a year. If you are wondering, one one hundred and
eighty five thousand dollars buys you in terms of actual work.
Here's a summary of his activities during the height of
Bog's criminality, written by Ours Technica Cook left for a

(01:06:26):
trip to Asia, Europe in the Middle East on August eighth,
twenty nineteen. While overseas, where he was traveling alone, mister
Cook drank heavily, the sentencing memorandum said. On August twentieth,
twenty nineteen, while in India, mister Cook saw and responded
to a draft Twitter message from Gilbert That's the other
former police guy, to which he acquiesced with a thumbs
up emoji, and later assented to a plan to use

(01:06:46):
multiple accounts to send the message string with a copy
all At this time, Cook was unaware that his co
conspirators had attempted surveillance in Massachusetts, and he was not
aware that colleagues might have engaged in role play at
the victim's house or directed creation a fake person of
interest reports to conceal their activities. The memorandums said. So

(01:07:06):
Cook's defense, you know, as being clearly implicated in all
of this illegality and in the planning stages of it,
is I was drunk, and I didn't know that they
were doing anything right, solid.

Speaker 2 (01:07:17):
Plant drunk on the other side of the planet.

Speaker 1 (01:07:20):
Right right now. He would also claim it sentencing that
the drinking company culture at eBay had led him to
develop a problem and that the poor judgment that resulted
from this was part of what had happened. And I
don't think that's entirely unfair, because Cook claimed that drinking
on the job at eBay was common and a lot
of the decisions here do make sense if you add alcohol, right.

Speaker 2 (01:07:41):
There's a lot of drunk energy too. Yah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:44):
Yes, I don't think he's entirely lying here. Cook, though,
does make claims that I think were entirely attempts to
protect himself. For example, he was found to have deleted
numerous messages with his boss related to the criminal schemes
that Bog had cooked up. In court, Cook claimed he
deleted those emails because Bog just sent him so much
crazy shit he assumed it was all jokes. This does

(01:08:07):
not hold up in court. Ultimately, Cook and six other
eBay employees, including Bog, pled guilty to a variety of charges.
This included the two members of the senior team the
senior security team who get convicted are Bog and Cook.
There are two members of the executive leadership team, Weimer
and Winnig, who are implicated but not charged. Of the

(01:08:27):
people who are convicted. Bog receives the toughest sentence, fifty
seven months in prison. David Harville, eBay's former global resiliency director,
gets twenty four months. Stephanie Popp is handed a little
over a year. Former police Captain Brian Gilbert has pled
guilty and not yet been sentenced, while Philip Cook got
eighteen months in federal prison and three years of house arrest.

(01:08:49):
eBay agreed to pay three million dollars in order to
defer prosecution. Now, I will say that seems like a
slap on the risk from eBay, who I think is
more responsible than three million dollars of this.

Speaker 2 (01:09:02):
They pay the three million to this to the couple.

Speaker 1 (01:09:05):
I think it's a mix of that and like you know, honestly, Jess,
I will cut in here when I find that out.
I should have checked on that. I think it's some
of its damages and some of it's like fines. But
it is worth noting that litigation is ongoing. They will
probably wind up paid. They will certainly settle for more.
This is the result of the criminal investigation. Ina and

(01:09:25):
David Steiner are suing eBay, as well as Devin Winnig
and Steve Weimer, and that's they're suing the other people
who are all convicted too. And I think there's a
good chance they are certainly going to settle for something there, right,
like the Steiner making addiction out of this.

Speaker 2 (01:09:41):
That the amount that they settle for will be much
less than the fifty seven million dollars that, yes, that
guy got. That was the number, wasn't it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:48):
Yes, fifty seven million was Winnigs exit package. And Winnig.
In case you're worried about our buddy, Devin is just fine.
He is on the board of General Motors to this
day and as a director at Cruz Audit, the autonomous
vehicle company. In June of twenty twenty one, he was
named to the Salesforce Global Advisory Board. So it's good
to know Devin's still doing great. I'm sure he is

(01:10:11):
utilizing their security resources in a responsible and legally ethical manner.

Speaker 2 (01:10:17):
Meanwhile, somewhere, I'm just imagining some eBay employee is right
now getting fired because they were caught working remote and
using like a mouse jiggler to appear to be online,
and they're accused of stealing one hundred and forty dollars
worth of the company's time. Yeah, and will be fired
with cause and we'll have difficulty finding another job for
months or years. And anyway, I.

Speaker 1 (01:10:40):
Love the justice system and I have no issues with
any of this. This is all. This is all capitalism
working the best way it can possibly work.

Speaker 2 (01:10:50):
No notes, Well, here's the thing. I know that there
are people like really want to abolish the prison system,
and I get it. It's not good at reforming people. Well,
it doesn't do what it's supposed to do other than
warehouse people for a while. Like in theory, you cannot
commit another crime while you're locked up in there, unless
you're committing against your other inmates, which is exactly what happens.

(01:11:10):
But I will say that in my perfect utopian society,
I do not know what I would do with this
Danny McBride ass freek who drove this whole thing. If
not prison, I don't know what you'd do with that guy.

Speaker 1 (01:11:25):
I you know, this is all fantasy stuff, but if
I were responsible for punishments, not just for Jim but
for guys like Defan winning, it would be like you
are going to have a comfortable one bedroom apartment and
you are going to work forty hours a week at
a job with you know where you're like doing some

(01:11:48):
sort of like direct facing like customer service role. Right,
Like you're going to be working as a barista, you're
going to be waiting tables, you're going to be working
at a call center, some sort of like actual job
where you do something and you just have to do
that for a period of years. Because to a guy
who gets a fifty seven million dollar pay package, I
can't think of a worse punishment than having to live

(01:12:10):
a normal working class life for like five years. You
have no access to your money, you have no access
to your vacation homes. You just have to work a
job every day like a regular person and have no power.
I think that would be worse than them than going
to club fed for a couple of years.

Speaker 2 (01:12:25):
I really do, not even as a punishment, but just
to acclimate to the world you're living in I think
the rest of us live in, right.

Speaker 1 (01:12:34):
I think there's an actual rehabilitative aspect to that. Like
some number of these people would just stay shitty, but
a couple of them, you assume, would actually realize, like, oh,
these are the regular people. My entire life has been
built on fucking over Like it might actually help. I
don't know not. My primary person for wanting.

Speaker 2 (01:12:52):
To do the flaw on our plan is that you
can't do that to their co workers at the Starbucks.
They're working that because you're in them on those people
and they do not deserve that.

Speaker 1 (01:13:03):
We would need a special government run coffee house where
you know everyone working there is a white collar crime. Hey,
you want to go to that coffee house and like
spit on the former CEO of JP Morgan.

Speaker 2 (01:13:13):
Be the worst place to get coffee?

Speaker 3 (01:13:16):
Yeah, it would be dog shit americanas anyway, Jason, you
have some books, plug them?

Speaker 2 (01:13:27):
Yes, the book that is out just if you're hearing
this hot off the presses in the books just a
couple of weeks away. It is on September twenty fourth.
It is called I'm starting to worry about this Black
Box of Doom. It is not a part of any
series I've ever read before. If you've never read any
of my books, this is as good a place as
any to start, even though it is by far the

(01:13:48):
most expensive of the books, because it is new that
it is up for pre order now in every format ebook, audio, hardcover.
If you're if you are in this after September twenty fourth.
It's on a shelf at a cool indie bookstore somewhere.
Go buy it that way instead of getting from Amazon.

Speaker 1 (01:14:07):
By Jason's books, I always do, and Jase, before we
were all that, actually I should have asked you this
right after we finished. Does any of this make more
sense to you? You had asked me to do this
Now that we've gone over, I think everything available on
this case. Does any of this make any more sense?
Or is it still just as much of like a mystery?

Speaker 2 (01:14:28):
No? But I have been in times in my life
I've been in a circle of other weirdos and we've
gotten worked up about something that in retrospect, looking back,
especially in my early twenties, looking bank, it's like it
was somebody else, you know, we got really mad about
somebody online or something. In looking back, it's like, man,

(01:14:50):
we were just we had nothing else going on in
our lives, and we got two worked up. I get
that dynamic, especially among a bunch of dudes, or a
bunch of dudes in a bunch of young women or
whatever the mix of people here was. I cannot make
heads or tails of why they chose this particular person,

(01:15:10):
this woman this blogger. I can't. I can't get there,
because every organization in the world, every company, every every group,
every club has got somebody out there writing mildly critical
stuff about them that doesn't it's not unique. You have
it wherever you go. I've had that since the late nineties.
I've you know, it's not fun to have people criticizing you,

(01:15:34):
but it's just part of being a public figure, even
a minor public figure. I can't get I can't. I
guess I would have to be in the room. I
can't think of another example where this has played out
this way. Again, Companies pulled dirty tricks, but it's cases
where they have, you know, they're overthrowing a government to

(01:15:54):
try to get cheaper labor on the rubber plantation. It's
not it's not this whatever this was.

Speaker 1 (01:16:01):
No, it's so weird to because like I have had
death threats, I've had what I thought really unfair criticisms
of me online. I had a guy because of who
I was, break my hand at a street fight with
a baton, and like, after I found out he'd lost
his job in his car, I was like, I probably
don't need to keep going after this guy. Sounds like
that's about enough, right, Like I didn't have the and

(01:16:23):
maybe I should have, but like I didn't have the
energy to get and that guy broke my boat. Like
I can't get in the head of this guy going
after this lady and making very mild criticisms. It's just wild.

Speaker 2 (01:16:36):
And I get the issue with the drinking and there
being a culture of drinking at a company that that's
definitely a thing that occurs. And I can definitely get
a bunch of dudes getting drunk and thinking it's very
funny to find a website where you can order animal fetuses,
and it's like, oh, let's mail her one of these,
ha ha. It's when you're on the plane flying to

(01:16:58):
her house that I think you have to wake up
and think. Me and there's a record of us by
these plans must our minds. We're going to trespass on
her property. We're gonna put a tracker on her car,
and we're gonna follow her around, and we're gonna start intivity,
like we're gonna let's be clear. Maybe you could argue

(01:17:20):
that the stuff we did mailing her weird stuff is
a misdemeanor. Maybe you can get off like that's something
chart type of charges the company can make go away.
Once you show up at somebody's house, and once you've
bought a crowbar to try to break into their house,
that's now real crime stuff. And then once the cops
fight out you're there, maybe on the orders of the

(01:17:42):
freaking CEO of eBay. That's now front page news, that's
now an article in the New York Times. That's the
kind of thing you can't possibly be unaware of. So
I get it. The world is full of weirdos and
people I don't understand. But it's one thing to not understand,
say Jeffrey Dahmer, who clearly was extremely ill and had

(01:18:04):
totally lost touch with reality. And here where you had
a bunch of people sending messages back and forth, in
all of them nodding along with like, yes, crusher, burn
her to the ground, leave nothing but ashes behind. I
don't get it. I'll never get it. I'm glad that
I don't get it.

Speaker 1 (01:18:23):
Well, that is our final word on the story until
next time. If your boss tells you, hey, I need
you to fly to Boston in order to place a
GPS tracker on this blogger's car, don't do that. You
might go to prison for a year. Anyway, this has
been Life Advice with Robert Evans, a co production of

(01:18:44):
Behind the Bastards Jason Thank you for coming on the
show by Jason's book Slash Books. We're Done. Behind the
Bastards is a production a cool Zone Media. For more
from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com

(01:19:04):
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part Two: That Time eBay's Private Spies Went To War With Some Bloggers