Case Study: Belgian Directory Service stops data scraping and safeguards revenue with Distil Networks

Belgian Directory Service stops data scraping, and safeguards revenue with Distil Networks

Belgian Directory Service (1207/1307), which maintains a database of over 8 million Belgian phone numbers and addresses and offers free consumer search plus paid business APIs, was losing valuable data to widespread web‑scraping. Manual IP blocks and costly legal actions proved ineffective or blocked legitimate users, leaving the company exposed to revenue loss and high IT/legal overhead.

The company deployed Distil Networks’ virtual appliance (HA pair), which automatically blocks scraping bots at the site’s front door while allowing legitimate users and licensed API customers. The hands‑off solution eliminated the bad bot traffic (about one‑third of web activity), improved performance to support growth, removed the need for repeated legal cases, and saved the business well over €100,000 per year in investigation and remediation costs.

Belgian Directory Service

Tom

IT Manager