The last eBay executive charged with criminally harassing a Natick couple who reports on the ecommerce industry was sentenced time served and a year of supervised release as well as a $20,000 fine for his role in the bizarre plot.

Brian Gilbert, of San Jose, Calif, served as the senior manager of special operations for eBay’s Global Security Team at the time of the harassment campaign.

The sentence was a significant departure from the prison time received by his six co-defendants two years ago. U.S. District Court Senior Judge William G. Young in the remote hearing adopted the joint recommendation of both the prosecution and the defense. The lack of prison time is seen as “compassionate release” as Gilbert suffers from an inoperable tumor. He has spent much of the last two years since he and the others were charged battling cancer.

David Steiner, who along with his wife Ina Steiner, told a federal judge in 2022 that what eBay executives did made their lives “a living hell” and expressed concern that the seven executives would do the same thing to other critics.

“This was a bizarre, premeditated assault on our lives … with buy-in at the highest levels of eBay,” David Steiner said then.

Prosecutors say the company launched a harassment and intimidation campaign in August 2019 against the Natick couple, who cover the industry on their blog EcommerceBytes.com, in retaliation to some articles critical of eBay’s business practices.

The company itself, which posted $2.6 billion in revenue for the first quarter of this year, agreed to pay a $3 million criminal penalty in January for the ordeal.

Gilbert is one of seven company executives directly charged in the case in June 2020. Gilbert is the last to be sentenced. The rest were sentenced between September and November 2022.

His sentence follows those of James “Jim” Baugh, the company’s senior director of safety and security, sentenced to 57 months in prison; David Harville, the former director of global resiliency, sentenced to 24 months in prison; Stephanie Popp, the former senior manager of global intelligence, sentenced to one year in prison; Philip Cooke, a former senior manager of security operations, was sentenced to 18 months in prison and a year of home confinement; Stephanie Stockwell, a former manager of global intelligence, was sentenced to one year of home confinement; Veronica Zea, a contract intelligence analyst, was sentenced to one year of home confinement.

This is a developing story.