From the Rippling blog …
Deel, a $12-billion unicorn company, orchestrated a multi-month campaign to steal a competitor’s confidential business information with help from a corporate spy, according to a lawsuit filed today in the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division.
The lawsuit alleges Deel cultivated a Rippling employee to conduct thousands of suspicious searches and funnel stolen confidential business intelligence directly back to Deel.
Deel’s agent used Rippling systems to spy on Deel’s own customers, who were discussing a switch to Rippling away from Deel. The spy searched the term “Deel” in the competitor’s systems on average 23 times a day over a four month period, which allowed the spy to comprehensively capture every detail of Rippling’s sales pipeline competing with Deel, including proposed pricing, details of sales meetings and conversations between Rippling and prospective customers evaluating a switch away from Deel, and training materials for Rippling’s sales organization on how to compete against Deel.
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.
