SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CITCON, the leading mobile payment and commerce solution provider, announced that it has prevailed in its lawsuit for misappropriation of source code trade secrets against RiverPay Inc, a Canadian Corporation and Yue (York) Hua, a co-founder of RiverPay and a former employee of CITCON.

CITCON sued RiverPay on May 2, 2018 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose, California. A jury trial was conducted from December 9th to 20th, 2019 before a jury of 5 men and 3 women from various walks of life. During the trial, RiverPay’s co-founder Yue (York) Hua admitted under oath that RiverPay’s source code was identical or substantially identical to CITCON’s source code, but claimed that CITCON’s former contractor, Dino Lab, owned CITCON’s source code.

On December 20th, 2019, the jury unanimously rejected the false claim of Dino Lab’s ownership of CITCON’s source code and found that RiverPay and Yue (York) Hua had misappropriated CITCON’s source code trade secrets. Specifically, the jury found that RiverPay and Yue (York) Hua had acquired and used CITCON’s source code trade secrets with improper means.

“By stealing the mobile payment system technologies developed by CITCON, RiverPay entered the mobile payment market and built its business in unlawful ways,” said Chuck Huang, CEO & Founder of CITCON. “The unanimous jury verdict is a clear victory for CITCON’s effort to defend its trade secrets and leading mobile payment system technologies.”

The jury awarded $1.5 million unjust enrichment damages to CITCON and also awarded punitive damages, the amount of which will be determined by the judge in the post trial proceedings.

About CITCON

CITCON is the leading unified payment gateway to connect merchants to billions of mobile wallet consumers around the globe. As one of the fastest-growing payment companies, CITCON grows the total payment volume (TPV) from zero to $400M/year in just two years. CITCON provides innovative mobile and digital payment solutions to more than 6000 clients around the world, including DFS, LVMH Group, Kering Group, Hyatt Hotel, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Bloomingdales, MSC Cruise, Caesars Entertainment Group, MGM Group, Revolve, GNC, IEEE. CITCON has formed strategic partnership with leading wallet providers and payment gateways including Alipay, WeChat Pay, China UnionPay, Origami Pay, Elavon (US Bank), FreedomPay, Shift4, Aurus, Cegid among others. Founded in 2016, CITCON raised $20M from institutional investors, including East West Bank (NASDAQ: EWBC), ZhenFund and HEDA Ventures. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, CITCON has five regional offices in the US, Canada, UK, and China. For more information, please visit www.citcon.com.