😱 eBay sent her live cockroaches to silence criticism, then it got worse

It’s Sunday, {{first_name | friend}}. Your personal information is for sale on the dark web right now. I’m not talking about your email, I mean your full identity package. Your name, address, SSN, DOB, credit card details, the whole enchilada. Everything a scammer needs to become you.

🤑 How much do criminals charge for the complete set about you on the dark web? A) $435, B) $150, C) $44 or D) $8. The answer’s at the end, and you’re going to be insulted.

⚠️ Speaking of your data: Remember, if the service is free, you are the product. Google and Yahoo scan your emails to figure out what to sell you. I switched to StartMail to stop the snooping. My favorite part is the disposable aliases. I create a dummy email address for shopping or newsletters. If the spam starts, I delete that alias, and the noise is gone. Yeah, my inbox is finally clean. Get a 7-day free trial and 60% off right now.* — Kim

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⚡ TL;DR (THE SHORT VERSION)

📖  Read time: 3 minutes

This is a wild true story that involves a dead pig.

Ina Steiner opened a delivery at her Massachusetts home. She screamed when she saw a bloody pig’s face. It was only a Halloween mask, but earlier that day, someone had tried to send a fetal pig preserved in formaldehyde to her. “What’s a wet specimen?” her husband, David, asked the delivery company. When he heard the answer, he called the police. Someone was very, very angry.

For 20 years, the Steiners had run EcommerceBytes, a modest newsletter covering online retail. They wrote about Amazon, Craigslist, eBay. Sometimes critical. Always honest journalism.

About 2,500 miles away in eBay’s San Jose headquarters, executives were reading. And they were furious.

On August 1, 2019, 30 minutes after Ina published an article about eBay suing Amazon, CEO Devin Wenig texted his communications chief: “If you are ever going to take her down now is the time.”

Chief Communications Officer Steve Wymer had previously texted the CEO: “We are going to crush this lady.” Soon, he texted security director Jim Baugh: “I want to see ashes. As long as it takes. Whatever it takes.”

What followed wasn’t a PR campaign. It was psychological warfare.

The Steiners were suddenly drowning in newsletter subscriptions: Sin City Fetish Night, the Satanic Temple, the Communist Party. Then came the packages. Live cockroaches. Live spiders. A funeral wreath. A book on surviving spousal death. Really.

Anonymous Twitter accounts threatened visits to their home. Craigslist ads invited strangers for hot sexual encounters at their address. Their sanctuary became a target.

Then they noticed the black van. Professional surveillance. Someone was watching.

Baugh had assembled a team: David Harville (director of global resiliency), Stephanie Popp (senior manager of global intelligence), Brian Gilbert (a former police captain) and three others. They flew from California to Boston. Staked out the Steiners’ home. Purchased tools to break into their garage to install a GPS tracker.

The plan? The “White Knight Strategy.” Terrorize the Steiners, then have Gilbert pretend to help them, gaining their trust and manipulating coverage.

David Steiner photographed a license plate. It belonged to a rental car that was traced directly to an eBay contractor.

When the FBI arrived, eBay’s security team scrambled to delete evidence and lie to investigators. Too late. Flight manifests and payment card records all led back to Silicon Valley.

By September 2019, all the conspirators were fired. Wenig resigned with a $57 million severance. Wymer, who’d demanded “ashes,” was quietly hired to run a Boys & Girls Club.

eBay’s internal investigation concluded Wenig’s messages were inappropriate but claimed he didn’t know criminal acts would follow.

Seven employees were convicted. Sentences ranged from probation to Baugh’s 57 months in federal prison. eBay paid a $3 million fine and admitted to six felonies.

But Wenig and Wymer? Never charged. Wenig still sits on General Motors’ board.

The Steiners filed a civil lawsuit seeking accountability from the executives who sparked it all. After years of delays, the trial is set to begin March 2, 2026. I can’t wait to see what happens there.

People went to prison for following orders. But the men who gave those orders, who wrote “crush this lady” and “take her down,” walked away and hold prominent roles today.

“This was a bizarre, premeditated assault on our lives with buy-in at the highest levels of eBay,” David Steiner told the court. Their fear? That corporations now have a blueprint for silencing journalists.

EcommerceBytes still publishes. The newsletter that a Fortune 500 company tried to destroy through live insects and psychological torture remains online, independent and unbroken. Because that’s the thing about the truth, you can’t terrorize it into silence.

Employees at eBay wanted to hide their misdeeds. Don’t let them. Forward this story to a friend to shine a light on what eBay put the Steiners through. Or post a link to your social media using the icons below.

Jim from Indiana talks to his AI companion Mia nearly nonstop. He tells me how he found out the real woman behind the bot is wanted by police. Plus: Why the Magnificent Seven shrunk to the Fab Four, ChatGPT to show ads, and five apps selling your moves.

Listen on Komando.com →

🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.

🦖 Remember SanDisk USB thumb drives? That dinosaur stock surged 976% in five months. AI is eating so much data that memory chips have become the new gold rush. Get this, Elliott Management, the fancy hedge fund that owns a piece of everything, sold their SanDisk stake right before the massive run-up. Their 750,000 shares would be worth $340 million today. They bailed out last fall when it was worth around $84 million. Even Wall Street’s smart money can't predict this AI boom.

🚨 Massive login leak: A public, unencrypted database holding 149M+ unique logins and passwords is floating around. Yeah, you’re on it. This includes social apps, streaming, dating sites, financial accounts, crypto wallets, even .gov credentials. It likely came from malware. So update your passwords like you mean it. And don’t just add “1” to the end. You need a solid password manager that generates passwords hackers can’t crack and logs you in with one click. Get 52% off now, $1.43 a month.*

TikTok just forced everyone to click “Agree” on a new privacy policy: Now that the US owns a part of the app, people are in a panic. Why? The app can collect your immigration status, sexual orientation, and precise GPS location. Plot twist, most of that's been in the policy since August 2024. You never read it. The actual new thing? Precise location tracking instead of approximate. But it's optional and off by default. So don’t fall for the online hype.

Opt-out in orbit: Starlink quietly updated its privacy policy to say it may share your personal data to train AI models, unless you opt out. This includes other companies, not only Starlink training its own AI. To tell Starlink “please don’t feed my data into someone else’s robot brain,” go to Settings > Edit Profile > scroll to the bottom > toggle off Share personal data… to train AI models > Save. Good thing you have me around.

🎧 I’ll tag along. Walking the dog, folding laundry, stuck in traffic, I’m great company. Listen to my latest show commercial-free wherever you get your podcasts. Search for my last name “Komando.”

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Drop your phone in an empty bowl or glass when playing music. Instant speaker amplifier. The bowl acts like a megaphone and doubles the volume without draining your battery faster. Brilliant.

Back-tap your phone for quick actions: You can double-tap the back of your phone to trigger things like screenshots, the flashlight or opening an app. On iPhone, open Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap and choose what it does. On Android, go to Settings > System > Gestures > Quick Tap (some models don’t have this).

🏡 Scammers sold her house while she was alive: It happened to 89-year-old Dorothy Tarpin. Thieves forged a deed, claiming she was dead. She didn’t find out until Medicaid cut her off for selling her home. Think that scam is hard to pull off? It’s terrifyingly easy. I use Home Title Lock. It alerts me the second anyone tampers with my title. Get a free Title History Report and 14 days free right now.*

Talk instead of typing: Writing a long message or document? You can speak to enter text anywhere you’d normally type. On Windows, click into a text box and press Win key + H to start voice typing. On Mac, open System Settings > Keyboard > Dictation, turn it on, then press the microphone key when you’re ready.

Museum mode: On a Roku, you can turn your TV into frame-like art when it goes idle. First, check that you’re on the latest Roku OS in Settings > System > System update. Then look for Backdrops on the Home screen or in Settings. Open it, pick an art collection and select Set as Backdrop. Your TV can finally hang with the art crowd.

📘 Tired of the AI buzzwords? Everyone is talking about AI, but few explain how to use it for business. NetSuite’s free “Demystifying AI” guide is the exception. It cuts through the hype and gives you a clear, practical road map you can actually use in your business. Stop guessing and start leading. Download the guide for free right now.*

🚗 Request your driving report sold to insurance companies: Use my step-by-step guide to find out what’s in your file for free.

🔊 Make your own song: Craft your perfect song using AI. So much fun!

Eat: Salmon, shrimp or steak cooked my favorite way, on a salt block. So dang good and easy!

🔍 Zoom in:  Zoom Earth lets you track weather systems and satellite views in real time

Amazon knows you better than your therapist. The least it can do is give you a discount. Check to see if what you buy all the time is on sale today. Click here.

DoorDash’s new robot, Dot, is what happens when Silicon Valley looks at a delivery driver and says, “What if this had no opinions?” 

Meet Dot: a 350-pound, 4.5-foot-tall robot that can haul up to six pizzas at 20 mph through bike lanes, sidewalks, and parking lots. It’s loaded with eight cameras, four radars, and three LiDAR sensors so it doesn’t mow down pedestrians.

The whole thing runs on a swappable battery and looks like Wall-E's overachieving cousin.

Best part? It won’t ring your doorbell 47 times at 11 PM after you specifically wrote “DO NOT RING” in all caps. Finally, technology that respects boundaries.

Tomorrow, I’m helping you save money on your phone bill. I’ll show you how all those extra charges work and tell you which carrier doesn’t pull these tricks. Also, why it’s going to be a rough week at Amazon. You’re not going to believe the health breakthrough that Stanford scientists pulled off and who’s asking to see your AirTag’s location now.

🤑 The answer: D) $8. That’s it. Your entire identity, the one you’ve spent your whole life building, protecting, worrying about, sells for the price of a Chipotle burrito. US identities are the cheapest on the dark web because hackers have so many of them from constant data breaches. Supply and demand. And yeah, that should make you mad enough to finally change those passwords you've been reusing since 2015.

I’ll never forget when a scammer called my mom and said he had all her passwords. She said, “Oh, thank God for you, what are they?” The scammer hung up and we both laughed until we cried. I miss her so much. 🙏

⚡ You've got this. Whatever “this” is. I believe in you! — Kim

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

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Photo credit(s): Gemini, Feppo, @selma.explores via TikTok

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