Overseasidol.com — The Beijing Chaoyang District Court recently handled a case involving the illegal sale of celebrities’ personal data.
The defendant, Zhang, was originally a fan who often went to airports to take photos of celebrities. As more people began paying her for photos, she joined several fan photography groups.
Through these groups, she met Shu, who claimed to work for an airline. The two started trading celebrity identification and flight details, priced between 50 to 80 yuan per piece.
Zhang later resold the information to fans for up to 1,000 yuan per record, earning more than 20,000 yuan in total.
Investigations revealed that Shu worked for an airline’s outsourced customer service company.
Although her job came with confidentiality restrictions, she exploited her access to the airline’s booking system to copy flight and ID data onto paper.
She smuggled these records out and sold them to Zhang for profit.
Shu illegally obtained and sold more than 100 records containing celebrities’ flight and personal information.
The court ruled that Zhang was guilty of infringing citizens’ personal information and sentenced her to seven months in prison and a fine.
She must also pay 23,000 yuan in damages for public interest harm and publicly apologize in a major news outlet.
Shu was also found guilty of the same offense, receiving a ten-month prison sentence with a one-year suspension, along with 13,100 yuan in damages and a public apology.
Additionally, she was banned from working in airline customer service during her probation period.
Reporters later discovered that such illegal data trading still exists on social media.
Searching certain keywords related to celebrity flights easily reveals dozens of posts offering “cheap flight information” or “full ID numbers of over 10,000 celebrities”.
Some users openly sell access to private chat groups that share celebrities’ flight numbers, schedules, and even addresses for just a few yuan.
Despite repeated crackdowns, this black market for celebrity information continues to thrive online.
