Last Wednesday, the Berlin-based online food delivery startup Delivery Hero and its German platform Lieferheld had a police raid on their office. Spiegel Online reported that there are investigations on the management team of Delivery Hero’s platform Lieferheld.de, on suspicion of computer sabotage.
Lieferheld is accused of repeated internet attacks (DDoS-attacks) against its competitor Lieferando. These attacks may have led to several down times on the Lieferando website. Lieferheld’s competitor said this caused a damage worth “at least 75,000 Euros”. Lieferando’s CEO stated that his team had analyzed the attacking addresses after a serious attack in December of 2011. One of these addresses pointed directly to a server which was rented by Lieferheld.
Lieferheld’s CEO Fabian Siegel called these allegations “totally absurd”. He stated: “I’m not so stupid to make myself liable to prosecution for a possible disadvantage of a smaller competitor.”
In addition, Fabian Siegel explained what Lieferando might have seen during its analysis: a Lieferheld crawler that automatically checks whether the figures about affiliated restaurants reported by Lieferando are true. According to Siegel, this is quite common in the industry. He then said: “If this leads to a collapse of Lieferando’s systems, they don’t have their technology under control.”
Lieferando will now proceed civilly against Lieferheld and aims for a compensation “in the low seven figures.” We’ll keep you updated!
By the way: You can find out about other interesting startups in food delivery in this list.
[…] of food delivery platforms (especially in Germany). Last month, for instance, we reported about a Police raid on Delivery Hero’s headquarter in Berlin. The reason for this was the suspicion that Lieferheld could be in some way related […]
[…] sabotage against competitor Lieferando, closing off a saga that hit headlines in April with a police raid on Lieferheld’s headquarters in Berlin. Now, the Berlin public prosector has thrown out the case. Continue reading on […]