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

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 $50 Logitech web camera that has no buttons on it. There's not a single button. And you look fine. There's no software that operates it. You look great.

No, I can't do I can't screw up the setup of it because I never did anything I plugged in the little USB cord and I appeared if it if anything else other than that had happened I would have been helpless 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 scarce resources? Those are my favorite social media accounts that talk about, like, we need to get back to when we were all just each growing our own food. That's when the standard of living was higher, back when we all...

When one blight could wipe out your crops and your whole family would starve. It's the-

I just, it would be so much more refreshing to deal with a bear right now than a camera. I understand a bear, right? You know, bears are very easy. They have very, very obvious wants 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 topic.

on this journey. What if instead of, 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? It's a better world. 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. Yeah, that's what Marx was really working at, was 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? Yeah, right here is where this becomes one of the weirdest stories I've heard in my entire life. Yeah, well, that's...

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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 Winig's 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 as the Steiners on Devin's shit list, was an anonymous Twitter account called FidoMaster, a.k.a. At Unsuck eBay. Now...

you and I have dealt with this guy all our lives, right? This is an angry dude online who hates you specifically 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 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 there's those guys exist on the right, too. There's like entire accounts dedicated to Joe Biden or like libs of TikTok and stuff where they're monetized hating account.

That's a sizable chunk of like how you make money in internet content. It's 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 – we 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.

The entire internet economy would collapse if that personality type disappeared. We really need them. Yeah, it's like a solid 40% of Silicon Valley's money is related in one way or another to that kind of guy. Fido Master is not really that kind of an account. Most of his posts about eBay, in the period where he becomes like the obsessive focus of a lot of the CEO's anger, get like a dozen likes, right? Yeah.

Yet, for reasons unknown, the entire C-suite at eBay, pivoting off of Devin's obsession, came to believe that FidoMaster 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, 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. Right?

for for Fido master. He just 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. I'm telling you, this kind of paranoia has been everywhere since Twitter came along. I 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 getting cancelled on twitter when what they were talking about was a total of three people complaining and each of their like 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, they used to be so scared of that.

That they would immediately fire somebody or immediately pull the ad, whatever, based on the meagerest, tiniest little bit of criticism on there. So I can totally see how they got freaked out by it. And it's the same as journalism has gotten the hollet out as an industry. There's a lot of political journalism as just leftists. Look at this new trend that's spreading among leftists. 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 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.

It does not take a dozen. They can find literally, you read those articles, they typically 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. And they make up a name for it. It's like, no, it was these three people who all went to the same middle school. Yeah.

Yeah, and that kind of thinking is clearly at play with Winning and with eBay's C-suite here. Regardless of how much actual engagement he's getting, because some of Fido 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 and not adequately responding to the fact that Amazon is starting to eat their lunch, right? But that would require them to...

take a hard look at how they actually function as executives, as opposed to just obsessing over this Twitter account. So you're seeing the same thing with Hollywood today, where there'll be some movie that they spent $300 million on based around a comic book character. Nobody had ever heard of and it 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. These 25 trolls on Twitter, they cannot sink a franchise. You did that. You did that.

Yep. And it's 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 Andor. 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 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 it.

Maybe, but also that show cost $600,000 per minute. Right. Of screen time. Like you can say, well, it's all this 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'd been fine. It's, you know, like the backlash was there, but if anything, it just made the show more visible. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway. Anyway, fascinating stuff. And yeah, so this is, you know, we're talking about kind of how it's writ 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 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 bogs plate, right? Enough people who are one step below the CEO, but a step or two above bogs.

forward him like, hey, the 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 Ina 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 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 Winick.

Right. That is the theory that former CIA operator fucking Jim Bogg comes up with. And there's no reason for him to think this. The writing is not similar between the account and anything that Steina does. And Bogg has no evidence that there's like that the posts are coordinated with the tweets or the articles are 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 the Steiner residence. 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 them know we're onto their scheme. So the idea was that this is going to prove...

- This will be showing them like, "Hey, we're onto you." - Right, we know what you're doing. I don't think it's to prove it, it's to like, smooth it. - How confused must they 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. 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 in town. Oh, Fido master. He tags freeways and occasionally suburban homes outside of Boston. It's his favorite thing. Um,

You'd assume – or maybe it was slang or something. You would never figure it out. 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-suite at eBay because that's insane. So now the question is, did that CEO who we spent most of the last episode talking about, did he know this occurred or is there any way to know? Like if he did know, is it something where it would have been said verbally in a hallway and not documented somewhere? Yeah.

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 Winnick 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. But again, a lot of messages are not present. And most of Bob does have a good amount of direct contact with Winnick, which is, again, he's not unaware of aspects of this. He definitely knows about aspects of this.

Precisely what he knows about is a little hard to say, right? Because a lot of who Bogg is communicating with directly is like the guy one step below the CEO.

Right. The fact that any of this made it into an email tells you that Bob didn't know what he was doing. Right. Of course, he's the worst at this. It's unbelievably stupid. Like, I know not to put that stuff in an email that somebody can recover that somebody like that's going to come out, especially again, my good God in a work email account. Yeah, it's yeah, it's it is. Yeah, it's unbelievable stuff.

So Bogg 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 herself Marissa. Her picture showed her to be about 25. 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, we'll prove that this guy is working with the Steiners by reaching out to her and saying, we have like embarrassing videos 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 acknowledge. 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 about 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 masters like, well, no, that sounds incredibly shady. Why would I ever do that? I don't know these people. Like what is wrong with you? Um,

The wilder her suggestions got, the more Fido Master resisted because whoever's running this account is 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, 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 Z, one of the young women 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 23. And criminology degrees...

Don't actually make people like tell people how to carry out criminal espionage. That's not really like 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. In short, it's not it's not sexist for us to point out that he his criteria for hiring these women was probably no. No.

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 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. 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 25th, 2019, chief of communications, Steve Weimer texted to eBay communications employees about an e-commerce bites article that mildly noted some issues eBay 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 60 and get crazy on her ass. But this is a huge adjustment the last 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 part of the C-suite. He's the chief of communications. He is the guy that Winig is talking to. And then Weimer is communicating very directly with Bog about all of the crimes that they're committing. And he's just like emailing back and forth like, I love our secret plan. I can't wait to go zero to 60 and get crazy on her ass.

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 that'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.

The e-sales scene? Yeah. Are we going to war against this lady? You guys are all yelling about you're really mad about something. Which post are you really... I guess I missed it because I just saw her briefly mention... It's like, no, that's the one.

We need to fling her into a volcano. Yeah. This lady is our Al-Qaeda. Like, we are doing a war on terror against her. It's so weird. There was something there with their corporate...

with their corporate culture that was so weird. 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, he's kind of born rich. He gets to become a CEO at age 23 because his dad 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 he hires, which are people that he like feel simpatico 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.

I hope I'm not just beating the 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 written or said? Probably the first time I had a cracked article published, you know, when I was like 19. Maybe earlier in arguments on something awful. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and they didn't invent the internet until I was in my 20s. 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 are if you live in the public eye on the Internet and you and I 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 so the idea that he is so hypersensitive to criticism, but.

I don't know how you can live to be age 12 in the internet era without having a thick skin about people calling 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 detail of this, of the history. I still can't wrap my head around it. I think it's because derangement is progressive and it is like a, it's a, like the derangement is like the pace at which it can, it 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 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 I think power like number one, there actually is some like

psychological science behind this. Like power is addictive in 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 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 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 Winning is just, and everyone below him is just spiraling. You know, that's really what this story is about.

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We're back. So...

A month or two after Steve Weimer, chief of communications, sends that message to some of his employees about going crazy on Ina's ass, on August 1st of 2019, the New York Times published an article about a lawsuit eBay had filed against Amazon for unlawfully poaching sellers.

In Ina's coverage of this article, she wrote about Winnig saying that he has, quote, been unable to stop a decline 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- Almost to a comical degree. Right. Like every quote you read from her, it's-

Yeah, it's it's remarkable. But when 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? Devin Winnig?

So you should note here that Winnig does 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 a second, repeats Winnig's statement to Bogg, like, Winnig,

Weimer after winning says this, if we're going to take her out, we got to do it now. Weimer messages Jim bog and says this hatred is a sin. I am very sinful, but,

Bogg 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 her done. Bogg says, so and so, 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 can take her down now. And then he starts doing all this biblical shit. Hatred's a sin and I'm very sinful, but we're going after her now. We're going to 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. 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 corporate people use language like they're talking about going to war. We're going to destroy it. We're going to burn it. But what they mean is we're going to call, we're going to get a conference call with the legal team and ask if we can send a mean letter.

on lawyer letterhead 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. No spoiler alert. Yeah. For where this is heading. So,

So Bogg does a yes and to Weimer's, like, we need to burn her down. And it's like, okay, I'm going to execute plan B. And Weimer promises Bogg, I will manage any bad fallout, right? Now, this conversation seems to be the first time that Bogg laid out to a superior his theory that the Phytomaster account was either run by Ina's wife or

or Ina's 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 Weimer, "'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. 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 following along with this. Bogg 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 directly under Winig. So in early August, Ina published yet another article about Winig's ever increasing salary.

The article was, again, a perfectly normal example of a reporting, but eBay leadership treated it like a death threat. Winnig, who I should note this very year, 2019, was voted number 100 on Forbes' list of America's most innovative leaders, 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.

Per CBS News. At this point, does she even know they're mad at them? Like, I know she knows that some weirdo spray painted something on her garage that was inscrutable. But does she even know that they're even reading her website? 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 red. Yeah. But she has no idea that any of this is going on.

Because why would you ever think? No one would assume this. This is crazy. And for what happens next, I'm going to quote from CBS News' 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 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, Bogg, 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 messages ashes message with his 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 FidoMaster had stopped their dastardly behavior of writing mean things about eBay. In email conversations, Winnig, Weimer, and Bogg lost their minds over the fact that Twitter refused to remove FidoMaster'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, and ANYTHING, all caps, we can do to solve it should be explored. Somewhere, at some point, someone chose 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.

period. So at this point, Bog has been told several times, do literally anything to stop these people. And he decides, he responds by asking, do I have permission to neutralize Ina's website? I think I can do it in two weeks or less. And Weimer again responds by saying, whatever it takes.

So what Bogg takes from this is that I should sign the Steiners' personal email accounts up for a bunch of porn newsletters and other newsletters as well. He signs them up for Sin City Fetish Night, the Satanic Temples newsletter, and the Communist Party newsletter for some reason. And then Bogg's chief aide, Mrs. Pop, posts the Steiners' 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. They don't recognize, certainly that all of these trolls are just one or two people at eBay operating a bunch of burner accounts.

So, Miss Pop. If somebody signed me up for a bunch of newsletters and mailing lists. I'd have that happen. I would not notice whatsoever. That public Gmail I use or the public inbox is just an ocean of.

It's all trash. So suddenly I'm getting something from like the whatever they signed him up for, a bunch of porn stuff or whatever. I did just like, yeah, that's that's what my inbox looks like. Yeah, that's always a normal day. Yeah, there is this actually less porn spam than what I had last week. All right. We're getting better. Yeah. Like 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 stalking 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 Ina Steiner for 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. Well,

What followed is described later in the court case against Bog, Pop, and the rest of the eBay skullduggery team as ordering, quote, 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? And 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 we were desperately trying to think who could it be?

Because you would never guess it's the CEO of eBay through a complicated process whose underlings are sending me a pig fetus because only a crazy person would assume that. 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 specifically to stop this from happening. Because of course, every weirdo is trying to send his ex-wife a pig fetus. Like the company that sells that stuff to whatever science classrooms, whatever, they're

Like, yeah, that's like 40% of their orders, I'm sure, is weirdos trying to send it to an enemy. So, yeah, they've got a thing where they're going to call the recipient and say, hey, you know, we've got a procedure for shipping these. Do you have a lab or whatever? Right. And do you want to pig feed us? Yeah.

Yeah. Do you actually want a pig fetus or are you one of the most of our orders? Whereas some some freak trying to send it to somebody there, they're angry at. It does show the very like Hollywood movie understanding of how reality works, where it's like, yeah, we'll just have a pig fetus mailed to them. We're like, no, that's not how these work. 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 have to do that yourself if you want to mail 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, calcium buildups inside their urinary tracts. There's, like, an elephant one in there that's the size of, like, a fucking... almost the size of a pool cue. So...

But that was someone who liked me. I don't know why they sent that, but it's nice to have. Oh,

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'd immediately think, yeah, I think I put this in a book. This must be a reference to something that happened in one of the books. It's clearly a fan. Yeah, it's probably a fan. Somebody last Christmas sent me some cookies and I ate them. Like, yeah, it's probably fine. They surely don't want me dead. They probably love me. It's hard to poison people. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So no, I didn't think twice about it. It's just so strange. Ina, they're just kind of baffled by the pig fetus thing. But then on August 10th at 4 p.m., a package containing a pig 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? Now, the good news is that

David and Ina 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 different kind of terrorist groups.

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 cop both sees that as it's happening and he like 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 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, Bogg 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 Boggs 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, to give you an idea. Because 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 just like weird, funny, silly, like harassment anymore. This is, this is, has crossed into being a very serious crime. Now, along with the threats to life and limb 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 edition of Hustler that was like, just turned 18. Look at this hot, barely 18 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 legal pornography. It's a little unclear to me how the best case scenario for this caper...

Yeah, it's supposed to 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, I think the guy, the man living next door, I think he might be looking at pornography. And the dude is like...

Yes, that is a shocking thing to accuse a man of. I have had a neighbor admit to me to being in divorce, which is like porn of like being an animal that's eaten by other anthropomorphic animals. Like this is the 18 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. The freakiest part is that he's still doing like analog magazine porn. Right. Like the most pervert thing I can imagine that you're you paid like like eight dollars for a like twenty three photos in it. Yeah. Like, all right. David, could you 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 walk you through this thing? Because there's a lot of options besides having a Hustler magazine mailed to your house today, actually. Yeah, anyway, it doesn't work. But you know what does work, Jason? Advertising. Theoretically. Anyway, here's ads.

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And we're back. So in addition to copies of the barely legal issue of Hustler, 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 surveil what's happening for obvious reasons, but this only provides them footage at first with bewildered delivery drivers shipping out insects, porn, and funeral supplies.

Online, Ms. 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, four exclamation points.

Again, not even clear because they're 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 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 the Steiners, on his own Twitter account, Mr. Weimer evoked Fred Rogers. He said a movie about the inspirational TV personality made him cry. And he once retweeted Mr. Rogers' line that, if there's anything that bothers me, it's one person demeaning another. But inside eBay, Mr. Weimer was goading the harassment on.

I want to see ashes, he told Mr. Baugh on August 11th. As long as it takes, whatever it takes. Mr. 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 Baugh and one of his analysts, Ms. Z, first class to Boston where the Steiners lived. They checked in at the Ritz and drove to the Steiners' home to install a GPS device on their car.

Alas, Boggs' CIA techniques were stymied by the unforeseeable 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 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. That's how you beat the cops, is you just commit so many crimes. That's the Trump method. It does actually work for some people, yes.

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 garage.

Alas for him and his team, they get spotted by the cops, who at this point had set up surveillance of the Steiner home. And they hear through Gilbert, the police captain they're working with on the ground in Boston, hears through an internet feed of the local police radio that the police are going to send a team over to the Steiner house. So they decide to stop temporarily their physical acts against Steiner.

Steiner property. But they did decide to order $70 worth of pizza from a 24-hour pizzeria and have it sent to the Steiners at 4.30 in the morning.

So for the next 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 house and just show up. Maybe people did before HIV, but that is not the way the world works anymore. 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? What was what was the point of that? What were they trying to find out or what? I think they were trying to get proof that Ina 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 to make it make better sense to you than that, 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 several grand going here to do. We have goals we're to accomplish with this trip and what they did once they were there.

I'm not saying that they didn't have a plan. It's just I can't figure out what 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.

Yeah, you're just trying to scare them away from posting, but at no point have they received a set of demands. No, like you sent me a box of bugs and you want me to piece together what I'm supposed 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?

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 a retraction you want me to post? I don't feel like you've given them anything actionable. That

Again, this is such a comprehensively incompetent effort. You can really see the incompetence in the fact that 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.

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, right? The police are taking this seriously and we clearly don't know what we're doing. But Boggs 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 and all we did was threaten to murder them. We've got them jumping in shadows.

Now, the Steiners 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 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 Boggs' team, who were all eBay employees. Bogg, the CIA man, had taken virtually no precautions to protect their identity. From the New York Times, quote, On August 21st, a detective showed up at the Ritz-Carlton to see Ms. Z. After Ms. Z dodged him, the detective called her phone as Mr. Bogg was hustling her to the airport. Mr. Bogg answered, pretended he was her husband, and played dumb.

Ms. Z's flight was not for hours, so they got a hotel room at the airport to hide out. Mr. Boggs sat on the couch and played a clip from the 2003 comedy Old School, in which a husband answers the door to a fellow who says, I'm here for the gangbang. He kept watching it over and over and laughing, telling Ms. Z to lighten up.

I feel like some listeners, because of the nature of this show, are waiting for us to get to the point where the eBay executives 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 this story to you because that's the kind of thing you think goes on. Mm-hmm.

This is so stupid and juvenile and weird. That's what draw me to the story, because it's not that what they did is this is not the most evil thing we've heard of. We talk about genocide on this show, but it is. Yeah.

I think it is illustrative of a thought process that in other organizations does lead to worse things, right? Like 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 think is a good way to look at it.

There are 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 has is capable of taking them down. And that guy was like, you know, was posting the location 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 there was like a Danny McBride movie about this type of thing happening. He would be the perfect guy to cast as Jim in this. Where the guy's like evil, but also dumb and.

And he's not harmless. Yeah. 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. He probably had a gun. We have to assume this guy probably carries a gun with him. He's got a police captain with him, too. So that guy could have had a piece, you know? And he's, you know, and he thinks he's been given blank check to burn this person down. Like anything, anything at all caps means that over and over again, you do anything wrong.

It's so weird. It's so weird. I do think you actually nailed the casting though. Danny McBride is exactly who you'd want for this. Oh, I've been picturing him all along. Everything he says, like the way he's so over the top dramatic and takes himself so seriously. But there's such like every idea he has is like...

Some people describe Danny McBride's acting as like a child suddenly in an adult's body. 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 in a hotel. And laughing and laughing. You worked for the CIA. Yeah.

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 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 burner account that's actually making the threats? Because clearly that person is involved in the deliveries because the threats are timed with the deliveries. Now, because the fake name Ms. Pop had used for that burner account was a Samoan name, Jim Boggs says, you need to go find a Samoan that we can blame for all this. That'll throw him off the case. Yeah.

Now, my favorite of Boggs' CIA specials was his attempt to have his team make fake dossiers slandering the Steiners and hand those over to the police. From the U.S. Attorney's Charging Document, on or about August 15th, 2019, Boggs directed Stockwell by a WhatsApp message to prepare an eBay person of interest report that listed the Steiners as eBay's top persons of interest. Boggs'

Bogg wrote, in the narrative, I need you to write that they have made direct threats to eBay, eBay's CEO and our employees. In parentheses, make it up. That's what I said. Just lie about them. Just lie about them. Pretend they're our top threats. Puts that in writing. Yeah. Brilliant. Now, while they're trying to cover up an ongoing criminal investigation, Stephanie Popp continued harassing the Steiners on Twitter.

On the night of August 21st, 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 Ina Steiner's home address. The other account posted it, while the other replied, "'Guess I have to pay Ina 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 really angling for a promotion because you are putting way too much effort into this job? And again, where's the voice of reason anywhere in the vicinity of this?

That voice bounced a while back. Not 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, even – I don't care how mad you are at this lady –

Like what we're doing is not going to be effective. It's not going to accomplish our goals as a corporation. 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. Like.

But the same day that Pop fakes that Twitter conversation, Bog has Gilbert execute what he called their white knight 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 eBay to the cops and say, hey, we can 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 are investigating that prepaid debit card, he tells Bogg and Bogg 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 random couple in Boston.

Very believable. Gilbert dutifully handed over this list of persons of interest to the Natick police who then interrogated him and another eBay employee about Stephanie Popp and Veronica Z. Gilbert claimed that Popp 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? Popp

But this is where you should be at this point. Right. Where everyone in eBay should be is like, OK, how do I make it look like I had nothing to do with this? What's the lowest person? And then someone else goes down for 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 22nd, the day Gilbert met with the Natick police. Right.

And she like cites their newsletters, Twitter account, 20 years of 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 going to visit her in Natick? Question mark, question mark, question mark. And she spells all of this in just the, a way people don't actually even type on the internet.

But I feel like 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 at the, we'll say, suggestion maybe, but not in a legally binding way of the CEO. And eBay's lawyers go, what the fuck? Yeah.

You've been doing what? 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? Priceless. Just beautiful. Yeah. I would sell my house to be able to go just see them, see this room full of lawyers for this whatever $20 billion corporation. Yeah.

and haven't explained fully what exactly had been done, including with emails. You sent them spiders? Expensed rental cars, flights. Yeah. You had a cop spray paint what on their house? Oh, man. Because you thought what? Because...

Explain to me again why you thought this was – oh, Jesus. I can't. The legal team starts to shit bricks, and they also start asking questions of Bogg. And Bogg panics, and he calls Weimer, who is the communications secretary. He's the one step down from the CEO, right? He's the guy that Winnig is usually complaining to, and he's Bogg's person of contact on the C-suite. So Jim leaves this message on Weimer's cell phone after the lawyers reach out to him.

"Hi Weimer, this is Jim Boggs personal cell. 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. 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 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 your superior? Again, can't emphasize enough, no crimes were committed. We wanted to get them on our side with the spiders that we sent them. The level of sophistication where he thinks, I know what's going to throw the cops off. I'm going to send a message stating that we didn't do a crime. No crimes were committed. Yeah. Amazing.

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. Yeah. We repeatedly said no crimes were committed. Could not have been clear about that.

Now, 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, Mr. Winnig, the CEO, had been smart enough to avoid 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 have no evidence that he committed any kind of crime. He has not been convicted of a crime. I have no evidence that he personally had anything deleted. He was, however, implicated in aspects of the breaking scandal in a way that I think 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 that

Devin Winnig can't stay CEO of eBay. He resigns later that same month with an exit pay package of $57 million. Fair salary for good work, you know? Lesson 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 57 million to leave. Nice work if you can get it.

To be clear, even if his role in all of this had been to not even know 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 the $57 million, in my opinion. So 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 Winnick seems like he might be kind of the guy who does some suing. Maybe not now. Lay low, Devin.

That's a good advice for all you Devins out there listening right now, by the way. Always lay low if you're a Devin. Anyway, Mr. Weimer, who is one step below Winnick, gets caught. He stays working for eBay for like another year, but he is the one that we know deleted a bunch of messages. And specifically, he deleted messages between himself and Bog. And who knows what those messages may or may not have implicated him or Winnick in, but

but Weimer is fired after this becomes clear. And obviously massively disgraced. He never has another, Oh no, sorry. He went on to 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 of anything.

Bog and five other employees are initially charged with cyberstalking and a couple of other different crimes like interfering with an investigation. Some of the people charged, like Ms. Z, are temporary employees who also immediately lose their job with no severance in addition to becoming functionally unemployable just as their careers are getting started. And it's these young women that I actually do feel bad for. They did get caught up to a degree where, like, you should have known better, but

But they were very young, much younger than Bog, you know, than 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 seriously fucked as a result of all this. And 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 2020, 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 police officer involved in this series of crimes in addition to the CIA man. Yeah, no comment. Huh? No comment. I said no comment. Yeah. 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. He was brought on as senior manager of security operations for eBay's global security team, working directly under Jim Bogg. His salary was $185,000 a year. If you are wondering what $185,000 buys you in terms of actual work, here's a summary of his activities during the height of Bogg's criminality, written by Ars Technica.

Cook left for a trip to Asia, Europe, and the Middle East on August 8th, 2019. While overseas, where he was traveling alone, Mr. Cook drank heavily, the sentencing memorandum said. On August 20th, 2019, while in India, Mr. 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 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 of fake person of interest reports to conceal their activities, the memorandum said.

So 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 plan. I was drunk on the other side of the planet. Right. Right. Now, he would also claim it's 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? There's a lot of drunk energy to. Yeah. Yes. I don't think he's entirely lying here.

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 Bogg had cooked up. In court, Cook claimed he deleted those emails because Bogg just sent him so much crazy shit, he assumed it was all jokes.

This does 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 people who are convicted, Bog receives the toughest sentence, 57 months in prison.

David Harville, eBay's former global resiliency director, gets 24 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 18 months in federal prison and three years of house arrest. eBay agreed to pay $3 million in order to defer prosecution.

Now, I will say that seems like a slap on the wrist from eBay, who I think is more responsible than $3 million of this. They paid the $3 million to the couple? I think it's a mix of that. And like, you know, honestly, 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 its like fines.

But it is worth noting that litigation is ongoing. They will probably wind up paying. They will certainly settle for more. This is the result of the criminal investigation. Ina and David Steiner are suing eBay as well as Devin Winig and Steve Weimer. And they're suing the other people who were all convicted too. And I think there's a good chance. They are certainly going to settle for something there, right? Like the Steiners are going to do well out of this. I'm going to make a prediction.

That the amount that they settle for will be much less than the $57 million that that guy got? That was the number, wasn't it? Yes. $57 million was Winnig's exit package. And Winnig, in case you're worried about our buddy Devin, is just fine. He's on the board of General Motors to this day and is a director at Cruise Automation, the autonomous vehicle company. In June of 2021, 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 utilizing their security resources in a responsible and legally ethical manner. 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 $140 worth of the company's time. Yeah. And will be fired with cause and will have difficulty finding another job for months or years. Mm-hmm. And, uh...

Anyway. I love the justice system, and I have no issues with any of this. This is all capitalism working the best way it can possibly work. 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. 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 it against your other inmates, which is exactly what happens. But I will say that in my perfect utopian society, I do not know what I would do with this Danny McBride ass

Freak who drove this whole thing. If not prison, I don't know what you do with that guy. I, you know, this this is all fantasy stuff. But if I were responsible for punishments, not just for Jim, but for guys like Devin Winig, it would be like you are going to have a comfortable one bedroom apartment and you are going to work 40 hours a week at a job with, you know, where you're like doing

doing some 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 $57 million pay package,

I can't think of a worse punishment than having to live 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. I really do.

Not even as a punishment, but just to acclimate to the world you're living in and that the rest of us live in. Right. 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 reason for wanting to do it. The flaw in our plan is that you can't do that to their coworkers at the Starbucks they're working at because you're inflicting them on those people and they do not deserve that. We would need a special government-run coffee house where, you know, everyone working there is a white-collar criminal. Hey, you want to go to that coffee house and, like, spit on the former CEO of J.P. Morgan? Be the worst place to get coffee. Yeah, it would be dogshit Americanos. Yeah.

Anyway, Jason, you have some books. Plug them. Yes, the book that is out just if you're hearing this hot off the presses and the book's just a couple of weeks away, it is on September 24th. 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 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 hearing this after September 24th, it's on a shelf at a cool indie bookstore somewhere. Go buy it that way instead of getting it from Amazon. Buy Jason's books. I always do. And Chase, before we roll that, actually, I should ask you this right after we finished. Does any of this make more sense to you? You had, you had asked me to do this. Now that I, we've gone over, I think everything available on this case, um,

Does any of this make any more sense or is it still just as much of like a mystery?

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 back, it's like it was somebody else. You know, like we got really mad about somebody online or something. And looking back, it's like, man, we were just, we had nothing else going on in our lives and we got too worked up.

I get that dynamic, especially among a bunch of dudes or a bunch of dudes and 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, this woman, this blogger. I can't get there because every organization in the world, every company, every company

Every group, every club has got somebody out there writing mildly critical stuff about them. It's not unique. You have it wherever you go. I've had that since the late 90s. It's not fun to have people criticizing you, 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 I can't think of another example where this has played out this way again companies pull dirty tricks but it's cases where they have you know they're overthrowing a government to try to get cheaper labor on the the rubber plantation it's not

It's not this, whatever this was. No, it's so weird because I have had death threats. I've had what I thought were 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 after I found out he'd lost his job and 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 I maybe I should have, but like I didn't have the energy to. And that guy broke my bones. Like I can't I can't get in the head of this guy going after this lady making very mild criticisms. It's just wild.

um and I get the issue with the 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 haha it's when you're on the plane flying to her house that I think you have to wake up and think

Man, there's a record of us buying these pantyhose. Have we lost our minds? This seems like a terrible idea. We're going to trespass on her property. We're going to put a tracker on her car.

And we're going to follow her around and we're going to start intimidating. Like we're going to, let's be clear. Maybe you could argue that the stuff we did mailing her weird stuff is a misdemeanor. Maybe you can get off. Like that's something, a 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, you're,

That's now real crime stuff. And then once the cops find out you're there, maybe on the orders of the 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, yeah.

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 totally lost touch with reality. And here where you had a bunch of people sending messages back and forth and all of them nodding along like, yes, crush her, 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.

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 Behind the Bastards. Jason, thank you for coming on the show. Buy Jason's book slash books. We're done. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I think a

A lot of people think that you're supposed to be going to therapy once you're like having panic attacks every day. But before you get to that point, I think once you start even noticing that you feel a little bit off and you can't maintain this harmony that you once had in relationships, that could be a sign that maybe you want to go talk to somebody.

There's always a benefit in talking to someone because we can all benefit from improved insight about ourselves and who we are and how we behave with other people. So if you're human, that's like a good indicator that you could benefit from talking to somebody. Find out if therapy is right for you. Visit BetterHelp.com today. That's BetterHelp.com.

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