Telecom CEO gets jail for leaking BlackBerry Z10 sales figures

A US judge has sentenced the director of retailer Wireless Zone to jail, house arrest and a fine for leaking figures on how many copies the retailer’s 400 stores had sold and how many customers brought back.

The CEO received $2,000 a month to give analyst firm Detwiler Fenton ‘real-time’ insight into smartphone sales. The CEO has therefore been convicted of fraud, Reuters news agency reported. The case was brought up by a lawsuit from manufacturer BlackBerry after a publication by the analyst firm in April 2013.

Detwiler Fenton claimed based on the figures from Wireless Zone that more people returned the BlackBerry Z10 to the store than people bought the device, which means that the smartphone would have negative sales during that period. The analyst firm called this a unique situation in business newspaper The Wall Street Journal. Customers would return the device because they found the control of BlackBerry 10 via gestures ‘unintuitive’. BlackBerry almost immediately denied the figures from the report.

The information was correct based on figures from some of Wireless Zone’s 400 stores, but those figures probably didn’t apply to the BlackBerry Z10’s global situation. The conviction seems to bring an end to the case, which has been going on for 2.5 years.