NoBroker, MyGate in legal tangle amid Covid crisis

On Monday, NoBrokerHood, the visitor, community and payment management app by NoBroker.com, said it filed an FIR against MyGate to report that the latter has stolen its proprietary customer database and contacted NoBrokerHood customers to sell them its services. It alleged that MyGate’s employees have been actively and persistently chasing management committee members of societies from the NoBrokerHood database and has resorted to these antics as NoBrokerHood has a much superior product offering that is rapidly gaining market share.

MyGate, a start-up focussed on enhancing convenience and security in gated premises, told BusinessLine that it has entered into a legal tangle with NoBrokerhood for allegedly stealing contact details of its customers, threatening and attempting to bribe its employees with an intent to illegally obtain confidential information, making unsolicited calls to its customers by using stolen data and spreading false rumours while creating business opportunities for themselves.

“After conducting an internal investigation, we issued a legal notice to NoBroker and its management/board through our Advocates on June 12. When there was no response from NoBroker, MyGate provided all the evidence including voice/audio recordings/text messages, etc., of the alleged incidents to the police along with a complaint, the basis on which an FIR was registered on June 19, 2020, by the Cyber Crime Police Station, C.I.D, Bengaluru,” said Abhishek Kumar, COO and co-founder of MyGate.

NoBroker’s take

Interestingly, NoBroker said it did not receive the legal notice issued by MyGate, neither did it receive any notification from the police of the FIR filed against them by MyGate. NoBroker filed an FIR against MyGate on June 28 at the Bellandur Police Station. An employee from NoBrokerHood, Vineet (name changed) received a call from Anuj Singh, an employee of MyGate offering MyGate’s software for a society named ‘Golden Skyview Apartments’. It is to be noted that ‘Golden Skyview Apartments’ is a dummy society created by NoBrokerHood for testing and demo-related work.

When Vineet asked how MyGate got his contact details, he was told that MyGate’s central team has access to the numbers of all management committees in Pune. In fact, Vineet had been added as a Management Committee member in the dummy society for testing just a few days back. He got suspicious and tried to avoid calls from the number. Anuj however kept chasing and offered to put MyGate to replace NoBrokerHood software. Anuj also knew that the dummy society was using NoBrokerHood ERP suite, which is a very new offering and gives NoBrokerHood an edge over all the other society apps.

“It is disturbing to see that MyGate is having to resort to such dishonourable antics to survive competition. We launched the NoBrokerHood app two years ago and till December 2019 had less than 1,000 societies/apartment complexes using it, but over the last six months, we have grown our market share to 4,300 societies across six cities. We acquired SocietyConnect in February and now have the best ERP solution for societies, a truly world class solution, which is way superior to MyGate’s product. It is easy to see that MyGate is finding it hard to cope with the situation as they’ve had zero competition until now and have been rapidly losing market share.

“We have concrete proof and call recordings of how they have stolen our data and we had to file a police complaint against them. We have always believed that good ethics form the foundation of good businesses and induct all our employees with best business practices. Companies should work within a legal framework and better their software instead of blatantly stealing competitors’ data” said Saurabh Garg, co-founder and CBO, NoBroker.com.

Denies allegations

Denying these allegations Abhishek Kumar said: “MyGate has been receiving complaints from its customers who were being contacted by NoBrokerHood employees who knew that MyGate licences were about to expire and were offering them its product licence instead. In parallel our employees are being poached by NoBroker and those who refuse to join them are being explicitly offered rewards for sharing customer lead-related information.

“Internally, we have all our customer information on Excel sheets, where we put in our own employees phone numbers. When these employees started getting calls from NoBrokerHood, our suspicions were confirmed and we issued a legal notice to them, which they blatantly ignored. We have been in the business for the last four years and our solution is being used in 9,000 societies across 20 cities by 1.5 million households.”