A Silicon Valley scandal. I'm Jason Horton.

I'm Rebecca Leeb.

And this is Ghost Town.

If hundreds of dollars of pizza, threatening messages, packages of cockroaches, spiders,

strippers, and swingers, arrived at your doorstep, you might think these things are all part of

a aggressive, yet traumatizing high school prank, not the machinations of a Fortune 500 company.

And yet, in 2019, these actions were sanctioned by high-ranking CEO and executives,

a cadre of blonde 20-somethings, and a dumpy, power-hungry middle manager, hell-bent on harassing

a small mom-and-pop New England e-commerce site.

I'm not kidding. Today on Ghost Town, eBay's bizarre, violent and chaotic cockroach cult.

It all started with Ina and David Steiner, a somewhat nerdy couple passionate about collectibles.

Ina worked at a publishing company and collected books, and David was a video producer who loved perusing yard sales looking for deals.

Four years after eBay was founded, keep in mind this was 1999, and e-commerce or at the time,

quote, buying things off of the internet was still not the norm, the two created

a website offering down-to-earth advice to online buyers and sellers. They called it auction bites

and later e-commerce bytes, which still exists today and whose reporting contributed greatly

to the research of this episode. Ina was the writer and David the publisher. And as the 2000s rolled around, they got

into a flow, with e-commerce bites becoming a resource for those active on Etsy, Amazon, and more,

specifically on sites where you are, you know, auctioning items off via the internet. They shared,

they shared trends, news, and insights into this world, and important people took notice.

Now, while e-commerce bytes was still a pretty niche publication, by the mid-2010s, it was read by

anyone who was anyone in e-commerce, including the executives at eBay. In early 2019, the site broke

...