An anonymous gift with a hefty bill
Imagine this: you’re an entrepreneur, you want to expand your business, and suddenly you’re offered a file containing 18,000 email addresses via an anonymous link. For free. No questions asked. Too good to be true?
For a trading specialist involved in this court case, it certainly turned out to be too good to be true. He downloaded the file and immediately sent a commercial email to the addresses — a great opportunity to attract new customers, he thought. A few hours later, after some help from an AI tool, it dawned on him that this might not have been such a clever idea. He deleted the file. But the damage had already been done.
The outcome? Summary proceedings, a penalty payment of up to €500,000 and an order to pay legal costs of €19,049.57 — payable to his competitor.
What had happened?
The defendant was a former business partner of the company The Matrix Unlocked (TMU), which sells courses on trading on the financial markets. After their partnership had ended, the defendant set up a competing business. When he downloaded and used that anonymous mailing list, he could have had a strong suspicion of what he was dealing with: 64 of the 66 recipients who raised the alarm with TMU were demonstrably TMU customers — and had never given their email address to anyone else.
A trade secret?
The judge was clear: a customer database is a trade secret, protected by the Trade Secrets Protection Act (Wbb). It does not matter that the defendant did not steal the database himself — he should have realised that a valuable database offered anonymously and for free was not above board. By using it anyway for his own commercial gain, he consciously accepted the risk of infringing another party’s rights.
What does this mean for you as an entrepreneur?
1. Your customer database is worth its weight in gold — treat it as such.
Ensure robust access controls and clear contractual agreements with employees, freelancers and partners regarding confidentiality. In this case, a former employee was found to have misappropriated the database. You must prevent and address leaks of this kind.
2. Never use a list whose origin you do not know.
Have you been offered a mailing list without a clear source, without payment and without the provider being identified? If so, there is a good chance it has been stolen. If you use it anyway, you are personally liable — even if you are the one who received it and not the one who stole it.
3. Do not ignore formal notices.
The court took a very dim view of the fact that the defendant had deliberately ignored the letters of formal notice. His own email to his solicitor showed that he was aware of this (“This is probably because we ignored his Dutch notice”). You come across statements like that in court — with all the consequences that entails.
An out-of-court settlement would have saved him a lot of money and a loss of face.
4. Harsh criticism of a competitor is not always unlawful.
TMU sent an email to 38,000 people to warn them that their data had been misused. The defendant attempted to enforce a retraction through counter-proceedings. This failed. As long as there is a sufficient factual basis for statements, critical or harsh commentary falls within the scope of freedom of expression — even if it damages your reputation.
The crux
Building up a customer database takes years. Protecting it requires conscious choices: sound contracts, strict access rights and immediate action if anything goes wrong. And if you’re on the other side — if someone offers you a list — there’s one simple rule of thumb: if you don’t know where it comes from, don’t use it.
Questions
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