Small business industrial espionage

[JadeOwl]

So I found out about this story that I’ll share with you because I’m curious to see who widespread the situation is.

This guy I know owns a small to medium sized import business where he sells parts for engines and stuff. For a while now his competition has been undercutting his prices and poaching some of his workers. So he got suspicious and during a regular maintenance he asked the IT guys to check all of his workers's computers.

And the IT guy found out that one of the sales girls had been passing along information to the competition, specifically to one of the guys who used to work there and got poached. What she did was, every time a customer would call asking for a quote for an order, she would send the competitor a copy of her boss’s quote and the contact info of the customer. She also had a ton of price lists that she shouldn't have on her hard drive.

I was surprised when I heard this story because I didn’t think this kind of cloak and dagger shit happened in the private sector outside of big business.

So what do you guys think? Have any of you come across a situation like this? A small or medium sized business that got actually spied on by the competition?

 

[Agent Mulder's Hair]

Did the guy confront the sales girl or what?

 

[JadeOwl]

Did the guy confront the sales girl or what?

He fired her ass of course.

 

[usfbrah]

I've seen it. I work for a business owned by a Chinese man. Cut throat. Someone always trying to get over on the competition

 

[mime]

I watched a most violent year recently and thought about that movie when you mentioned the situation. it's about competition in the oil heating industry in the 80s and how it turns to violence.

yeah some people will do whatever it takes in competition, even in sports you see some/a lot will use PEDs when they can get away with it, the more competitive it gets, the more cutthroat people get i guess

 

[Organic Damage]

I think the scale on which people are willing to use underhanded tactics to eke out any advantage at all will surprise you.

When I worked at Future Shop we used to have to do "price shops" (sneak into a competing store and check their prices on certain items so we'd always have lower sticker prices)so we wouldn't get customers coming into do price beats. Yet a price beat only gave you 10% of the difference in prices, which for identical items generally turned out to be a few dollars.

Money is money.

 

[bufetadanacara]

Oftentimes people are legally bound by contract to not share company information.
She is lucky she hasn't been sued and jailed.

 

[MadSquabbles500]

This happens a lot in RE industry. But the RE industry has an ethics code, and ethics hearing commission. You can report unethical behavior, and they will bring you in for a hearing. You can lose your license if found guilty, or penalized in some way.

 

[DIABOLUS]

I like to think of it as being a proactive business owner.

 

[ralphc1]

There are companies that have people come in and physically remove hard dives to copy them to check to see if anyone is leaking information. Seems they could just copy them to an external drive.