The Boston-area husband and wife who federal prosecutors allege were the target of a harassment and stalking campaign by former eBay employees are speaking about their ordeal.
David and Ina Steiner told ABC’s Good Morning America that the campaign of alleged harassment began with graffiti spray-painted on the fence of their home, then escalated in increasingly bizarre ways.
“I started getting harassed online through Twitter, through unwanted email subscriptions, and these were really disturbing emails,” Ina Steiner said.
Then the mysterious deliveries began.
“We got a phone call from a shop in Arizona that said that they couldn’t deliver the wet specimen that we had ordered,” David Steiner said.
“Not having any idea what a ‘wet specimen’ was, I asked her,” he said. “It was an embalmed pig fetus.”
They also received cockroaches, a book about surviving the death of a spouse and a mask worn by the killer from the movie “Saw.”
Asked whether she ever thought eBay executives could be behind the campaign, Ina Steiner said she thought “it was a psychopath.”
“I never in a million years would have thought it was a company,” she said.
The Steiners did not immediately respond to an NBC News request for comment.
The Steiners told the Boston Globe that the campaign of harassment began in June 2019 and that they were targeted at their home in the Boston suburb Natick because they run the decades-old online newsletter Ecommercebytes, which reports in part on auction giant eBay.
What began as an online harassment campaign quickly spilled into the real world, the Steiners said, with various small companies trying to make deliveries of odd items the couple never ordered — a pizza arrived at 4:30 a.m. one morning after they had been stalked the day before.
“All of these small retailers, they were being weaponized to be used against us,” David Steiner told the Globe.
Eventually, he managed to lure a car that was tailing him into the open and was able to snap a photograph of the license plate.
After providing the license to authorities, the Boston Globe reports, “the Natick police quickly started to unravel the conspiracy” because the vehicle was rented to an eBay contractor staying in Boston.
“The misconduct of these former employees was wrong, and we will do what is fair and appropriate to try to address what the Steiners went through,” eBay said in a statement shared with NBC News.
“The events from 2019 should never have happened, and as eBay expressed to the Steiners, we are very sorry for what they endured.”
The company said it was “extremely cooperative” and helped state and federal authorities with their investigation.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
