Case Study: Illegal Web Crawling and Criminal Conviction in China

KG Company, founded in 2014 and later pivoted to internet technology, developed a web‑crawling program in 2017‑2018 to automatically query a city’s residence‑permit website for property and loan‑related data, aiming to improve efficiency for its mortgage‑assistance business.

The crawler accessed the government site at high frequency, reaching tens of thousands of requests per hour, and also scraped real‑estate listings from various platforms.

In April and May 2018, the residence‑permit system experienced outages; investigations traced massive traffic to the crawler, which was later confirmed to have generated up to 183 requests per second, extracting about 1.5 million records and causing service disruption for over 5 million registered users.

Authorities seized the server and source code, discovering that the program performed unauthorized, high‑volume queries without handling new captcha mechanisms, effectively constituting an illegal automated attack.

Both the CTO, who authorized the development, and the programmer, who implemented the crawler, were arrested. The court found them guilty of “interfering with the operation of a computer information system,” sentencing the CTO to three years and the programmer to one year and six months in prison.

The case highlights the severe legal risks of unregulated data scraping and underscores the importance of compliance, risk assessment, and ethical considerations in information‑security practices.