Guilty car salesman fined for retaining and selling data to competitors

A man has pleaded guilty and been fined for unlawfully retaining and selling thousands of pieces of customer records from the car leasing company he worked for in Hertfordshire.

Shortly before he resigned from his role as sales consultant, at Leaseline Vehicle Management Ltd., Alexander Doré, 44, sold over 3,600 pieces of personal information he’d taken from the company's internal customer database. He approached multiple competitor companies with this information, whilst claiming that the data belonged to him.

The breach was discovered in November 2022 and subsequently investigated by the ICO.

Dore pleaded guilty to unlawfully obtaining and selling data, a breach of section 170 of the Data Protection Act 2018. He appeared at St Albans Crown Court on Tuesday 17 September where he was ordered to pay a fine of £1,200 and £300 costs.

Head of Investigations, Andy Curry said:

“Customers put their trust in any number of organisations on a daily basis to use and store their data in a legal and appropriate way. Mr Doré took advantage of that trust, as well as the trust of his employers, by taking customer information that he then passed on to other companies, purely for his own financial gain.

“It is with great thanks to Leaseline Vehicle Management Ltd that they brought Mr Doré’s wrongdoing to our attention, and we were able to investigate.

“We hope this successful prosecution shows we will work with companies to bring those committing crimes to justice.”