"I got it, I sell it, I still got it."
Or is the term of art "Presstitute"?
From the Register:
After selling his site for millions, founder hacked it for a second payday
"Operation Resume Hoard" was going well. Initiated around April 1, 2015, it represented David W. Kent's plan to build the membership of his oil and gas industry networking site Oilpro.com.
Court documents indicate that Kent, 41, of Spring, Texas, USA, had a buyer in mind: DHI Group, the employment data biz that in 2010, when known as Dice Holdings, had purchased an oil and gas industry networking site he had founded a decade earlier, Rigzone.com, for $51 million.
Kent wanted more and hoped to get it by growing Oilpro.com – a site he founded around October 2013, shortly after the expiration of the non-compete agreement that followed from the Rigzone sale – into an attractive acquisition target.
By January 2016, Oilpro's membership database had grown to at least 500,000 members. It would have been an impressive feat of marketing but for the fact that Kent hacked Rigzone to obtain the email addresses he would use to build membership at Oilpro.
His sales pitch to the DHI Group attributed the site's growth to reaching out to the contacts of Oilpro members, traditional marketing techniques, and "network effects."
Had DHI Group gone through with the deal – at a suggested cost of $20 million or more – it would have bought data is already had.
But as it happened, a spam complaint alerted the company that something was wrong. A Rigzone member contacted customer support to complain about receiving a solicitation from Oilpro despite having never submitted any information there.
Honeypot
Court documents describe how Rigzone.com, after finding no evidence that anyone from Oilpro had accessed its database, set up a honeypot: two fake accounts in its database with no public facing profiles.
Lo and behold, those accounts each received email solicitations to create profiles on Oilpro.com. Eventually, Rigzone figured out what was going on.
Between 2013 and 2016, Kent and at least one of his Oilpro employees accessed Rigzone's database several times without authorization, coming away with more than 700,000 customer accounts....MUCH MORE
