Case Study: Illegal Web Crawling Causing System Outage and Criminal Conviction

KG Company, founded in 2014 and later focusing on internet finance, developed an automated web crawler in early 2018 to query a municipal residence‑permit website for property and loan risk assessment.

The crawler was deployed on a cloud server, making hundreds of thousands of requests per hour, and was also used to scrape real‑estate listings.

In April and May 2018, the target website experienced outages; investigations traced massive request traffic to the company's server, leading to police involvement and the server IP being blocked.

Forensic analysis revealed that the crawler accessed the residence‑permit system at a rate of 183 requests per second, extracting about 1.5 million records and causing extensive service disruption and data leakage.

Both the CTO and the programmer were arrested in August 2018. Judicial examination confirmed the presence of large volumes of property data and the crawler source code on the server.

During trial, the defendants claimed the crawling was for public information and lacked malicious intent, but the court found them guilty of interfering with a computer information system serving over 50,000 users, deeming the impact especially severe.

The court sentenced the CTO to three years imprisonment as the principal offender and the programmer to one year and six months as an accomplice.

The case highlights the legal risks of large‑scale web crawling and underscores the importance of assessing technical feasibility and compliance before deploying automated data collection tools.