Documented cases attributed to corporate / competitive intelligence threat actors, sourced and fact-checked.
Advance Machine Company's West Coast sales manager repeatedly rifled Tennant Company's sealed, covered dumpster in California to steal sales leads.
DocumentedP&G-hired competitive-intelligence contractors obtained confidential Unilever hair-care information from discarded garbage before P&G self-disclosed the operation, fired three employees, and settled with Unilever in September 2001.
DocumentedThe HP spying scandal began with a hunt for a boardroom leaker. Hewlett-Packard's investigators hired contractors who posed as directors and journalists to get their phone records from carriers. When it came out in 2006, it cost HP a $14.5M civil settlement with California. Then came a congressional hearing, felony charges against five people (chairwoman Patricia Dunn among them), and federal guilty pleas from three contractors.
Reported/allegedGreenpeace alleged in a civil suit, dismissed in both forums without any finding on the merits, that Dow Chemical and CONDEA Vista Company (bought by Sasol Ltd. in 2001 and sued as Sasol North America, Inc.) had, through two public relations firms, subcontracted the private intelligence firm Beckett Brown International to run repeated trash-collection raids on its Washington DC offices between 1998 and 2000, one subcontractor being a District of Columbia police officer engaged off duty and expected to use his badge to reach a locked trash enclosure.
DocumentedAir Canada admitted in a sworn Ontario Superior Court affidavit that it hired private investigators who twice took trash from outside the home of WestJet's co-founder and vice-president of strategic planning (a collection his own affidavit says involved the investigators walking onto his driveway, a claim IPSA disputed) and had shredded documents digitally reconstructed by a Houston forensic firm, as part of its corporate-espionage suit against WestJet, a fight that ended in a CAD 15.5 million WestJet settlement and public apology.
Social Engineering Examples