eBay and the Deliveries You Never Wanted – WIRED

Michael Calore: Is that the new flavor of smoothie that shows up in your Hello Fresh box?

LG: Does Hello Fresh deliver smoothies?

MC: [Laughs] I don't know. You tell me.

LG: I don't know, but I'm intrigued. No, I'm going to explain what that means. Just keep that phrase in mind. Absolutely bananas insane.

[Intro theme music]

LG: Hi everyone, I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED, and you're listening to Gadget Lab. I am joined remotely by my cohost, WIRED senior editor Michael Calore, who is back from a break. We missed you.

MC: Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be back, and it's great to see your face on the little postage stamp on my screen.

LG: I'm sure you missed Zooming in your time off.

MC: I did, yes.

LG: All right. "Absolutely bananas insane" is what WIRED's digital director, Brian Barrett, tweeted the other day when he shared his story about the harassment campaign that six former eBay employees allegedly launched against a Massachusetts couple who happened to run an ecommerce news site. And that is what we're going to talk about first on today's podcast. Brian, thanks for coming on Gadget Lab.

Brian Barrett: Thank you guys for having me back.

LG: Then later in the show, WIRED's Lily Hay Newman is going to join us to take us through the details of a troubling Russian disinformation campaign. But first, I'm just going to call this story bananas eBay. Is that OK? Can we just call it bananas eBay? I think that's what it says in the court documents, right?

BB: Yep. I think so. Allegedly bananas eBay.

LG: A criminal complaint released this week by the Massachusetts District Attorney's Office lays out this series of bizarre allegations that former eBay executives coordinated a long outrageous harassment campaign. Brian, take us through the details of the case. How did this all start? What do we need to know?

BB: Well, I will just give you the speed-run version, because there are too many details. It's a 56- or something page criminal complaint, and every page is more bizarre and alarming than the last. So it all started last August. Two eBay executives who we now know to be the former CEO and the former head of PR we're texting each other, complaining about a site called EcommerceBytes, which they felt was covering eBay too negatively. The former CEO says to the former head of PR something to the effect of, "Take her down." That was in one of the texts. And that launched an alleged caper that lasted for two or three weeks. One thing I want to make clear is that everything here, nothing's proven. There's still a legal process to play out, and the two executives in question are not charged with anything. It's sort of a Thomas Beckett, "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" situation. It feels like where they handed the ball to their head of global security and he ran with it and threw it at a middle-aged couple from Massachusetts.

LG: So what exactly did they do?

BB: We have six eBay employees and contractors, all of whom have left the company since or were fired, who plotted a bizarre campaign to harass this couple. The strategy was two-pronged. One, they were going to mail increasingly disturbing packages to their home that included live cockroaches, a Halloween mask that looked like a bloody pig's face, live fly larvae, live spiders, a funeral wreath, and a book about how to cope with a dead spouse. This is a married couple. Phase two was to create a phony social media profile that would continually batter these people with DMs, taking credit for all of the deliveries that were going on. Eventually, in a huge galaxy brain strategy moment, the eBay employees said, "You know what? We're going to make this couple feel like they're under attack, and then step in as eBay and solve their problem for them so that they will be nice to us."

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eBay and the Deliveries You Never Wanted - WIRED