David Kent of Texas has pleaded guilty in a Manhattan court to charges of hacking a competitor’s database and stealing information from more than 700,000 customer accounts, according to the US Department of Justice (DoJ). Kent, who heads up Oilpro.com, allegedly also attempted to sell his company to the company he hacked.

In 2010, Kent sold a networking website catering to the oil and gas industry professionals to a New York company and served as its president until 2011. In 2013, he launched a similar company called Oilpro.com and tried to increase its membership by illegally accessing the database of the company he had sold and stealing customer information, says the DoJ.

He then allegedly used this data to influence those clients to join Oilpro, and later tried to sell Oilpro to the NY company, which the DoJ did not name in its press release.

Kent was arrested earlier this year and his sentencing is scheduled for March 17, 2017.

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