- A Rippling employee detailed his time spying on behalf of Deel in a new court filing.
- Keith O'Brien said Deel's CEO instructed him to steal Rippling corporate secrets.
- When he was caught, Deel offered to relocate his family to Dubai, he wrote.
A Rippling employee accused of being a corporate spy for a rival HR software company admitted to secretly working for Deel, according to a new legal filing.
The employee, Keith O'Brien, wrote in an affidavit made public in an Irish court Wednesday that he was recruited as a corporate spy by Alex Bouaziz, Deel's founder and CEO.
"Alex told me he 'had an idea.' He suggested that I remain at Rippling and become a 'spy' for Deel, and I recall him specifically mentioning James Bond," O'Brien wrote in the affidavit.
"About thirty minutes later, I called Alex back over WhatsApp and told him that I was onboard with the plan," O'Brien added.
The affidavit came in legal proceedings in Ireland, where O'Brien worked in one of Rippling's satellite offices.
The San Francisco-based workforce management software company has a long and bitter rivalry with Deel. Each company has been valued at north of $10 billion.
In March, Rippling sued Deel in San Francisco federal court, alleging Deel turned O'Brien — who was not named in the lawsuit — into a corporate spy.
Rippling said O'Brien had collected company secrets on the company's Slack, Salesforce, and Google Drive networks and then passed them on to Deel, giving the rival a competitive edge.
O'Brien said in the newly filed affidavit that he collected the information at Bouaziz's direction. His first conversations with Bouaziz are recounted in a section titled "I begin spying for Deel."
"Alex was particularly interested in Rippling's strategies around global payroll and expansion efforts, as well as reviewing specific sales, marketing information, and customer details," O'Brien wrote. "Alex would give me direction for what terms to search on Rippling's Slack system in order to yield the information he wanted."
For his work, O'Brien received a monthly payment of $6,000 a month, mostly in cryptocurrency, he wrote. He also communicated with Philippe Bouaziz, Alex's father and Deel's CFO, he wrote in the affidavit.
Representatives for Deel didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company previously said it denies "all legal wrongdoing" and would file a counterclaim against Rippling.
Rippling said in its lawsuit last month that O'Brien was caught after the company devised an elaborate honeypot operation that led him to search for information in a phony Slack channel called "#d-defectors," where Rippling employees purportedly discussed information Deel would find embarrassing.
In the new affidavit, O'Brien wrote his handlers at Deel realized Rippling had set the trap — but not until it was too late.
"I ran the search immediately and began to look at the results," O'Brien wrote. "Within minutes, Alex messaged me again and told me not to run the search because he believed it was a 'trap.'"
"I told Alex that by the time I got his message, I had already done the search and he said 'oh shit,'" O'Brien continued.
Rippling said in its lawsuit that it brought O'Brien's spying to the attention of an Irish court, which appointed a lawyer to Rippling's office to seize his electronic devices to examine.
When O'Brien was confronted by the lawyer, he hid in the bathroom and appeared to try to flush his phone down the toilet, Rippling alleged.
In O'Brien's affidavit, he said the lawyer's appearance made him realize "how serious this was" and he "panicked."
He performed a factory reset on his phone while in the bathroom and "flushed the toilet a couple of times," he wrote.
O'Brien left the Rippling office and contacted Alex Bouaziz, he wrote. A Deel lawyer instructed him to get rid of his phone, he wrote.
"He told me to destroy my old phone by breaking it up and throwing it in the canal," he wrote.
The next day, O'Brien "smashed my old phone with an axe and put it down the drain at my mother-in-law's house, as Deel's lawyer Asif had advised," he wrote.
Deel also offered to move O'Brien's entire family to another country, he wrote.
"Deel's lawyer Asif said they would move me and my family to Dubai, and would figure out a mechanism to cover my legal costs," O'Brien wrote.
O'Brien said he became frustrated with the people at Deel, who he said wanted to promote a false story accusing Rippling of violating Russian sanctions to "shift the narrative."
Deel's attorneys also deleted their messages and made it hard to reach them, he wrote.
After a few days, O'Brien agreed to cooperate with Rippling, he said.
"I was getting sick concealing this lie," he wrote. "I realised that I was harming myself and my family to protect Deel."
"I was concerned, and I am still concerned, about how wealthy and powerful Alex and Philippe are, but I know that what I was doing was wrong," he continued.
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