Rippling, a workforce management platform, has recently released the affidavit of the Rippling employee (Keith O’Brien) who testified that he was working as a spy for the HR tech company’s arch rival, Deel, a $12-billion unicorn company.
On March 17, 2025, Rippling filed a lawsuit alleging that Deel had orchestrated a four-month campaign to steal its confidential business information with the help of Keith O’Brien. Rippling had leveled charges against Deel, ranging from violation of the RICO racketeering act to misappropriation of trade secrets and unfair competition against its competitor.
"After Rippling’s security team detected the spy’s unusual systems activity, Rippling set a honeypot for Deel’s senior leadership to conclusively prove their involvement.
Rippling crafted a letter that referenced an empty Slack channel in Rippling’s corporate Slack instance called “d-defectors,” and implied the Slack channel contained messages that would be of interest to Deel.
The letter was sent to only three people – Phillipe Bouaziz, the chairman of Deel’s board, CFO, General Counsel, and the father of Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz; Spiros Komis, Deel’s Head of US Legal; and the company’s outside counsel at law firm.
Within hours of sending the letter, Deel’s spy inside of Rippling searched – for the first time – for this empty and never-before-used Slack channel, proving that Deel’s top executives or its legal representatives were running the covert espionage operation,” noted Rippling in its blogpost.
READ THE COMPLETE REPORT HERE.
