“Give me your password” 10 months after leaving the company... Non-prosecution of employee accused of obstruction of business

An employee who was accused of theft and obstruction of business by his former employer for demanding overdue severance pay was acquitted.

According to the legal community on the 27th, the Incheon District Prosecutors' Office cleared A, a woman in her 40s, who was sent last month on charges of theft and obstruction of business.

During the process of leaving the company in 2024, Mr. A was accused of using force to interfere with work by copying Hwasa product design files and work reports to a personal external hard drive and failing to hand over work data and company SNS account passwords to his successor.

However, Mr. A denied all charges. He refuted that before leaving the company, all data was transferred to the company's PC at the company's request, and SNS passwords were also shared with internal employees.

Mr. A then claimed, “I reported the company because of continuous non-payment of wages, but I received a complaint 10 months after leaving the company. It was a malicious complaint.”

The prosecution accepted Mr. A’s claim. The prosecution determined that the information stored in the computer cannot be considered property under criminal law because it is not a tangible object, and that even if Mr. A took it, the crime of theft cannot be established because the information itself does not decrease or the possibility of the company's possession and use is reduced.

Regarding the charge of obstruction of business, considering that Mr. A transferred the data to his successor's PC and that the company requested a handover 10 months after the suspect left the company, we judged that Mr. A's claim was highly credible.

Attorney Kim Ji-hyeon of Daeryun Law Firm, who represented Mr. A, said, “We were able to obtain a good result by actively demonstrating the legal principle that digital data cannot be subject to theft because the original remains intact even if copied, so there is no infringement of possession.”

Reporter Jeong Cheol-wook

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“Give me your password” 10 months after leaving the company… Non-prosecution of employee accused of obstruction of business (link)