NoBroker, myGate accuse each other of data theft, file FIRs
- The companies are in talks with their respective legal teams to look for a recourse and have started an internal investigation to understand the data breaches
BENGALURU: Real estate search portal NoBroker and gated-community management platform myGate have accused each other of stealing proprietary customer information and filed first information report (FIRs) against each other.
Both NoBroker and myGate have raised capital from Tiger Global Management.
While, myGate counts likes of Chinese internet giant, Tencent as its investors; NoBroker is backed by private equity major General Atlantic, SAIF Partners as well as BEENEXT.
NoBroker, which operates its integrated visitor, community and payment management app NoBrokerHood, said competitor myGate accessed its internal customer base and tried to chase management community members of societies, urging them to shift to the myGate platform.
NoBroker filed an FIR against the founders and employees of myGate on 28 June at the Bellanduru police station in Bengaluru. A copy of the FIR was reviewed by Mint.
According to NoBroker, the data leak was confirmed earlier this month when a myGate employee called a NoBroker employee regarding sale of an apartment, which was NoBrokerHood's dummy listing for testing and demo activities.
"... When the NoBrokerHood employee asked how myGate got the contact details, he was told that myGate’s central team has access to numbers of all management committees in Pune,” said NoBrokerHood in an official statement.
“Our biggest surprise was that the employee, who got a call, was added to the dummy society only a few days back and information of those employees and our dummy societies for testing is only privy to selective NoBrokerHood employees,” said Saurabh Garg, co-founder and chief business officer, Nobroker.
NoBrokerHood, which has close to 4,300 residential complexes leveraging its solutions, keeps 14-15 dummy societies on its internal platform, which are used for testing features before launch.
Now, NoBroker is looking to take legal action.
On the other hand, myGate has accused NoBroker of a similar data theft.
“For the last three months we have been getting inputs from our field team and existing clients complaining that they are getting calls from NoBroker. This led to us to launch an internal investigation between mid-May and June,” said Abhishek Kumar, co-founder, myGate.
Kumar said myGate has recorded conversations of NoBroker employees calling myGate employees (which were earlier at NoBroker), asking for sensitive information including pricing, sales commissions and training curriculum for societies.
myGate also said NoBroker employees have been impersonating as potential clients and calling its sales executives to get access to the critical information, apart from stealing its internal customer database.
“We entered two new societies, on our central customer data base and listed numbers of our own employees, against them to investigate the matter. Within days, we got calls on those numbers from NoBroker employees, asking us to try the NoBrokerhood platform,” Kumar said.
myGate had issued a legal notice on 12 June to directors and investors of NoBroker, in a bid to stop these activities. myGate also filed an FIR against the founders of NoBroker on 19 June. A copy of the FIR and legal notice issued by myGate has been reviewed by Mint.
The companies are in talks with their respective legal teams to look for a recourse and have started an internal investigation to understand the data breaches.
myGate, at present, has more than 9,000 residential societies on its platform.
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First Published:29 Jun 2020, 05:25 PM IST
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