Good morning. Ebay agreed to pay a $3 million criminal penalty after employees engaged in a harassment campaign against two bloggers for their coverage of the company, including mailing them live cockroaches and a fetal pig.

EBay didn’t dispute the charges or the facts presented by federal prosecutors as part of a deferred prosecution agreement, according to court filings.

• Stalking and witness tampering: The e-commerce giant was charged with two counts of stalking through interstate travel, two counts of stalking through electronic communications services, one count of witness tampering and one count of obstruction of justice.
   
• Senior involvement: James Baugh, eBay’s former senior director of safety and security, led a team of other staffers and contractors in 2019 to retaliate against the bloggers for their critical coverage of the company, the company admitted as part of its deferred prosecution agreement. Baugh and his other co-conspirators sent the bloggers a bloody pig mask, live roaches and a fetal pig, according to prosecutors.
   
• Outside monitor: Law-enforcement officials in August 2019 notified eBay that members of its security team were taking suspicious actions, the company said. EBay then launched an internal investigation with outside legal counsel. As part of its deferred prosecution agreement, eBay said it would continue to cooperate with federal prosecutors and will be subject to an independent compliance monitor.

Note to readers: The Morning Risk Report won’t be published Monday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We’ll be back Tuesday.

Manhattan U.S. attorney wants to encourage more self-disclosure.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan has launched a pilot program that seeks to offer an incentive to individuals to report to and cooperate with authorities in the prosecution of criminal conduct, Risk & Compliance Journal's Mengqi Sun reports.

The program, announced Wednesday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, known for shepherding high-profile white-collar criminal cases, aims to help prosecutors bring more misconduct to light.

Bitcoin’s trip to Main Street just took a detour.

Vanguard said Thursday it won’t offer the new spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds on its brokerage platform. Vanguard wasn’t the only platform to limit investor access to the funds. Individual investors said on social-media platform X that they were unable to access the products on the trading platforms operated by Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Edward Jones and UBS as well.

Representatives from those companies weren’t immediately available for comment. But some of the hiccups may be because the funds haven’t yet been approved by the banks’ compliance departments. The first U.S. ETFs that hold bitcoin were cleared Wednesday by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

• Don’t Get Caught Like the SEC: Protect Your Online Accounts With Two-Factor Authentication

• Federal regulators have formally notified Boeing that it is being investigated following an incident with its 737 MAX 9 plane.
   
• A group of Jewish students sued Harvard University, saying it allowed the school to become a bastion of antisemitism.
   
• The Biden administration is preparing to dig into the deal to sell United States Steel to a Japanese company.
   
• The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Shanchun Huang with allegedly inflating Future FinTech Group’s share price just before he took over as the company’s chief executive.

Iran seizes oil tanker linked to U.S. sanctions dispute.

The Iranian Navy said it had seized an oil tanker off the coast of Oman that has been at the center of a dispute between Iran and the U.S., raising the stakes amid a spate of attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels along Middle Eastern shipping routes and warnings of retaliation from Washington.

The vessel, formerly known as the Suez Rajan, has a complicated past. Last year, the Suez Rajan’s charterers pleaded guilty to charges filed in a U.S. court that it carried sanctioned Iranian oil. The company was fined and its Iranian oil cargo was seized.

• U.S.-Led Yemen Strikes Heighten Risk of Broader Middle East Conflict

Inflation edged up in December after rapid cooling most of 2023.

Prices ticked up in December, a reminder of the pressures still facing consumers after a year when inflation fell by nearly half and paychecks grew, delivering real wage gains in 2023 for the first time in three years.

Inflation’s cool-down from historic highs keeps the Federal Reserve on track to hold rates steady later this month and contemplate cutting them later this year. But Americans aren’t in the clear yet. The consumer-price index increased 3.4% from a year earlier in December, the Labor Department said Thursday. The acceleration from November’s 3.1% advance shows inflation isn’t fully beaten.

• Retailers say more goods are coming back as fraudulent returns, including items that have been outright stolen.
   
• Retail executives say a growing wave of theft is cutting into profits that were already under pressure. But theft is just one contributor to so-called shrink in the industry.
   
• Sustainability and ethics are boosting the appeal of lab-grown diamonds. And they cost less.
   
• Biotechnology venture capitalists and entrepreneurs aim for a turnaround after two years of declining venture investment and few IPOs.
   

🎧 Listen to Morgan Stanley’s Jeremy Beal discuss how private fund managers are courting individual investors in search of new streams of capital.

• Microsoft’s AI-powered stock rally briefly made the software giant the largest U.S. company by market value on Thursday, before Apple reclaimed the spot.
   
• Chris Christie’s exit from the Republican primary race gives Nikki Haley a clear chance to corner the market among GOP voters looking for an alternative to Donald Trump.
   
• Airbus, the world’s biggest plane maker, smashed its near-decade old record for the highest number of orders in a single year, as airlines scramble to secure the limited availability of new aircraft.
   
• Hertz is selling about a third of its global electric-vehicle fleet, a major reversal for the rental-car company after it positioned itself as a champion of the technology with plans to vastly grow its fleet of plug-in models.

Follow us on X at @WSJRisk. Follow Risk & Compliance editor David Smagalla @DSmagalla_DJ and reporters Mengqi Sun @_MengqiSun, Dylan Tokar @dgtokar and Richard Vanderford @VanderfordRich.

You can reach us by replying to any newsletter, or email David at david.smagalla@wsj.com.