Beijing King&Capital Law Firm senior partner Yang Hangsheng lawyers, Li Song lawyers and Peng Qi lawyers team on behalf of the rights of a teaching company executives leave their jobs ‘another cooker’ damage to the interests of the company, the success of the public security organs of the criminal case and the relevant responsible person in accordance with the law to take criminal coercive measures, the victims of the unit to protect the rights of the achievement of the results of the stage! In the process of handling this case, the victimised unit achieved a milestone in defending its rights! In the process of handling this case, when the victim unit intended to sue for the crime of infringing on commercial secrets and faced with multiple difficulties such as the difficulty of collecting evidence and long time limit, the lawyer team, based on the rich criminal theory and practice of King&Capital, proposed to take the suspected crime of infringing on citizens‘ personal information of the relevant competing behaviours as a breakthrough, and ultimately assisted the client in filing a complaint against the suspects and their units for the suspected crime of infringing on citizens’ personal information with the public security authorities. The client was eventually assisted in filing a complaint against the suspect and his unit with the public security authorities for the alleged offence of infringement of citizens' personal information. After reviewing the case in accordance with the law, the public security authorities considered that the case was suspected of a crime, met the conditions for filing a case, agreed to file a case for investigation, and took criminal measures against the relevant persons in a timely manner, effectively combating the illegal and criminal acts, and safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of the private enterprise.
Case background
In the middle of 2024, a large private education group company (hereinafter referred to as Company A), which is well-known in the industry, found that the executives and employees responsible for a certain business segment of the group left the company one after another within two months, with the basic loss of the core personnel and an overall turnover rate of over 70%, which directly resulted in the shutdown of the business segment and heavy losses. After an internal investigation to understand that the business sector, led by the general manager of several executives in office, began to plan ‘another cooker’, not only in the staff to spread ‘A company's capital chain is about to break’ and other rumours, the establishment of the ‘ghost’ company, and A company, the company's capital chain is about to break. ‘Company A, and most of the departed employees of Company A, after leaving the company, quickly joined the ‘ghost’ company, doing exactly the same business. Most critically, the executives instructed their employees to steal more than 100,000 pieces of potential customers' information from Company A before they left the company, including but not limited to the phone numbers, micro-signals, transaction intentions and sources of information of potential customers.
Company A invested tens of millions of dollars in capital costs and immeasurable time and other costs in the past few years to incubate the training business, from strategic planning, resource deployment to team building. The proximity of the ‘ghost’ company to Company A, the close interaction between the two parties, and the blatant infringement have had an extremely negative impact on Company A and even on the industry!
Infringement involves potential customer information with secret, commercial value and confidentiality, the infringement is a typical infringement of trade secrets, rights involving civil, criminal and administrative procedures. Considering the characteristics of civil rights and administrative reporting, especially the rights cycle and to avoid further losses continue to occur and other factors, the client expects to be more direct, the strongest protection of criminal means, timely and effective curb the infringer's unlawful acts.
Identification of obstacles:
Infringement of trade secrets offence is difficult and slow to file a case
According to the provisions of Article 219 of the Criminal Law, this case meets the constitutive elements of the crime of infringing commercial secrets: (1) several executives in this case, as a natural person with full criminal responsibility, violated the confidentiality and non-competition agreement signed with the company during the period of employment, and is the eligible subject of the crime of infringing commercial secrets; (2) several executives in the period of employment instructed subordinate employees to steal potential customers' information prior to leaving their jobs, and after the violated the duty of confidentiality after leaving office and used the customer information for the operation of the same training business by the company involved in the case, indicating that they acted on their own initiative and actively pursued the intention of obtaining, disclosing, and using the information on the customer list of the company in which they had previously served; (iii) the act of several executives of using stolen customer information for the operation of the same training business not only infringed on the rights holder's rights and interests of trade secrets, but also undermined market economic order, which was in line with the the object element of this crime; (iv) the stolen information in this case was more than 100,000 items, and the secret value of the customer information was huge, exceeding the criminal offence filing standard stipulated in Article 73 of the Provisions of the Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security on the Criteria for Filing and Pursuing Prosecution of Criminal Cases under the Jurisdiction of Public Security Organs (II).
Confined to the fact that trade secret crime cases often involve professional knowledge and secret information, and that there is a certain professional and technical threshold for ascertaining the facts of the case, etc., the authorities handling the case often need a third party to issue an appraisal opinion, such as usually requesting the person reporting the case to submit a Non-Public Knowledge Appraisal Report, a Consistency Appraisal Report, and a Loss Calculation and Evaluation Report, etc., and these appraisal and evaluation prerequisites not only consume a lot of money but also require a long time. The time required is long, which is the same as ‘distant water cannot quench the thirst of the near’ for the client who hopes to stop the infringement and other claims as soon as possible.
Another way:
To infringement of citizens' personal information crime report clever break the situation
King&Capital team of lawyers in-depth analysis of the details of the infringement, accurately captured the stolen potential customer information is not only an important part of the trade secret, but also has the attributes of personal information of citizens. The infringer's infringing behaviour constitutes the competition between the crime of infringing trade secrets and the crime of infringing citizens' personal information.
According to one of the provisions of Article 253 of the Criminal Law, this case also meets the constitutive elements of the crime of infringing citizens‘ personal information: (1) the subject of this crime is a general subject, and the executives, as natural persons with full capacity for criminal responsibility, and the “ghost” company involved in the case are the eligible subjects of the crime of infringing citizens’ personal information; (2) the executives knew that they had not been informed by the citizens themselves of their potential customer information, and that they had no knowledge of their potential customer information, and that they had not been informed by the citizens themselves. (b) The executives knew that they had intentionally infringed on citizens‘ personal information by stealing and collecting citizens’ personal information from the victim organisation without the consent or authorisation of the citizens themselves, and used it for use or business operation; (c) The executives made illegal use of citizens‘ personal information that they had improperly obtained, which infringed on the security of the citizens’ personal identity information and the order of the management of the citizens‘ identity, and was in line with the object element of the crime; (d) The citizens’ personal information that had been illegally obtained was more than 100,000 pieces, which was a huge amount of personal information. Personal information of more than 100,000 articles, which was a huge quantity, and the content of the information included mobile phone number, name, micro-signal, etc., and reached the sentencing standard of particularly serious circumstances as stipulated in Article 5 of the ‘Interpretation by the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate of Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in Handling Criminal Cases of Infringing on Citizens’ Personal Information’.
Compared with the offence of infringing commercial secrets, the collection of evidence for the offence of infringing citizens' personal information is relatively simple and clear. In the application of the law, the criminal law protection of citizens' personal information in the continuous improvement, the crackdown on this type of crime is also continuously strengthened, the judicial practice of the determination of the standard is more clear, which also provides a more solid legal protection for the rights.
Based on this, King&Capital lawyers constructed a complete and solid accusation system through rigorous evidence collection and collation, and finally assisted the Company A to submit a detailed criminal indictment and hundreds of pages of evidence to the public security authorities for the suspected crime of infringing on citizens' personal information. A few days later, the public security authorities opened a criminal case for suspected infringement of citizens' personal information.
Tips for handling the case
In the complex situation of several competing offences, King&Capital lawyers, based on the client's core demands, considered the way to attack, and constructed a system of indictment that was sure to hit the target. In this case, the person concerned was suspected of infringing on trade secrets, infringing on citizens' personal information, and illegally operating a similar business, etc. In the end, after the defendant filed a complaint, the entity filed a lawsuit. In the end, under the complaint filed by the victim unit and the enforcement of law by the public security authorities, the case was successfully filed for the offence of infringing on citizens' personal information and criminal measures were taken against the persons concerned, while the public security authorities are also investigating the facts of other suspected offences.
In today's increasingly competitive business environment, trade secrets are undoubtedly the core competitiveness and lifeline of enterprises. For the education industry, customer information resources are the core lifeline of enterprise development. Enterprises should not only guard this trade secret, for the infringement of trade secrets should also have to fight the strategy and method.
‘To cut the complexity and simplify the tree in three autumns, to lead the different standard new February flowers.’ When the complexity of the infringement may constitute several crimes, the infringed party can also try to change the mindset, to constitute the elements of a simpler crime as the focus of the initial charge, both for the client to achieve the purpose, but also to help the public security organs as soon as possible and investigate the facts, and ultimately to achieve the ‘different paths lead to the same place,’ the legal effect!
