Talk:EBay stalking scandal

Elliott Management
Nice article! I notice in the New York Times article that came out on September 26, that they mention the fact that, "In January 2019, the temperature in Global Security and Resiliency went up even further. Elliott Management, a hedge fund considered merciless even by Wall Street standards, bought a chunk of eBay and asked for changes. Nobody was safe — especially the chief executive, Devin Wenig." Elliott Management is co-run by Paul Singer. Is this worth mentioning in the article? Novellasyes (talk) 17:47, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Naming those charged
Should not this be incuded: James Baugh, 45, of San Jose, Calif., eBay’s former Senior Director of Safety & Security, was arrested today and charged by criminal complaint with conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses.

David Harville, 48, of New York City, eBay’s former Director of Global Resiliency, was arrested this morning in New York City on the same charges and will make an initial appearance via videoconference in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York.

In addition the following defendants were charged in an Information unsealed today: Stephanie Popp, 32, of San Jose, eBay’s former Senior Manager of Global Intelligence; Stephanie Stockwell, 26, of Redwood City, Calif., the former manager of eBay’s Global Intelligence Center (GIC); Veronica Zea, 26, of San Jose, a former eBay contractor who worked as an intelligence analyst in the GIC; and Brian Gilbert, 51, of San Jose, a former Senior Manager of Special Operations for eBay’s Global Security Team. They are each charged with conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses and will make appearances in federal court in Boston at a later date. Wjhonson (talk) 23:25, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Feel free to add that and anymore information you find pertinent. This article was created only yesterday so it truly is a work in progress. Thanks. Thriley (talk) 01:49, 29 September 2020 (UTC)


 * I added those names. Three of those charged (Stephanie Popp, Stephanie Stockwell and Veronica Zea) are considerably younger than the others and had positions of considerably lesser authority (especially Zea). One does wonder if they were charged in order to provide them an extra incentive to provide comprehensive details about what happened to the authorities or whether the authorities really actually want to put them in jail. Still, as of right now, they were all charged. Novellasyes (talk) 16:01, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Amazon affiliate program
Don't know if this is worth going over here, but for the record, I agree with reverting the content added to the article by that has to do with ECommerceBytes being a member of the Amazon Affiliate Program. Although this wasn't 100% clear from those (now reverted) edits, I think the user was wanting to imply that because ECommerceBytes participated in that Amazon program, it had a conflict of interest that should be mentioned, or that it had such a large conflict of interest that this is why EBay took an interest in it. I would have two objections to including that content. (1) Many (as in probably hundreds-of-thousands) of websites belong to the Amazon Affiliate Program and pick up a small amount of money from it via commission from referred links. It's hard to imagine that this is enough money to generate a COI on the part of ECommerceBytes. So it's just generally hard to take that seriously but I could be wrong. (2) The main and much bigger objection to including that is that I don't see any evidence that the mainline press that has been covering this scandal thought it was relevant. I also don't see any evidence that the prosecutors thought it was relevant. I also don't see any material where the folks who work at EBay cared about it either. Novellasyes (talk) 13:36, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Was the security department completely rogue?
Another set of (now reverted) changes introduced by have to do with whether or not there really was a chain of causation between the upper/senior management of the company, and the crazy things done by the security department that has now led to a number of indictments. I introduced that concept to the article (I think) following on the lead of the NYT cockroach article. 's point, though, could be that this really hasn't been established. Sometimes, teams or people simply do go rogue and their senior leaders aren't in any way responsible for what they get up to (except in the general sense of "the buck stops here" that applies to senior leaders everywhere). That said, there is that now-infamous text from Devin saying "take her down". Anyway, I'm somewhat torn. Novellasyes (talk) 13:44, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

The text sent by CEO Devin Wenig to Baugh
removed from the article the sentence that says, "CEO Devin Wenig sent a series of text messages to James Baugh, the company’s senior director of safety and security, ordering him to "take her [Ina Steiner of EcommerceBytes] down". His edit summary says "The FBI complaint did not allege that Mr. Wenig sent text messages to Jim Baugh. Please review the complaint. This is factually incorrect." I didn't revert 's change because the sentence that was in the article didn't have a citation, even though it is a strong claim. I'll do some research to discover the source of that claim. That said, Truthchild's edit summary suggests that unless the Wening text is mentioned in the FBI complaint, it doesn't belong in the article. I don't agree with that. If credible, reliable sources exist around that, it could still easily belong in this article regardless of what the FBI complaint does or doesn't say, although I'd be open to persuasion on that, if Truthchild wants to spell out a more detailed case for why it should only be mentioned if it was in the complaint. Novellasyes (talk) 14:14, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Guilty Plea
Two charged have pleaded guilty: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/ex-ebay-workers-plead-guilty-to-roles-in-cyberstalking-campaign Thriley (talk) 03:29, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Here is More 60 Minutes put out an overview on how the ebay stalking allegations played out in the investigation process https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ebay-stalking-scandal-haunts-steiner-couple-60-minutes-2023-03-26/2601:640:C682:8870:6550:DF45:C062:16D4 (talk) 01:13, 29 March 2023 (UTC)