“James Bond” style operation to spy on companies that would have targeted the technological business in the bay region

A man allegedly allegedly in a trial to be a business spy who stole secrets from a technological business in the Bay region in the name of his Rival Arch declared in a legal file that the plan had been drawn up as a Bond style operation.

Startups of software for managing the trigger trucks and Deel are locked up in a legal battle on the affirmations by waving that Deel cultivated a spy in his Irish office which was taken with a “jar of honey”.

The companies of San Francisco, according to reports on their assessments, are both “decacorns” worth 10 billion dollars or more, and have made their public rivalry through the advertisements of duels mentioning each other by name.

The undulation continued Deel last month at the American district court of San Francisco, describing the alleged mole that as “DS” for “Deel Spy”.

Now, a man by the name of Keith O’Brien said in a jurors’ lawyer at the Irish court that he was the spy, and that the Skullduggery included coded communications like “sending this watch to London” which could appear in a film Bond.

Deel did not immediately respond to requests for comments. A Deel spokesperson has already denied “all legal reprehensible acts”.

O’Brien, according to the affidavit he has done under oath, has worked at the Dublin office, Ireland in Rippling since July 2023 on world pay and compliance products, and sought to jump the ship to Deel in March last year. He followed the request process but was rejected, said the affidavit.

In September, when he was still in the undulation but looking for a consultation work with Deel, O’Brien contacted the co-founder and CEO of Deel Alex Bouaziz and told him that he thought of leaving the undulation to focus on the advice. Bouaziz suggested a phone call and both spoke, the Affidavit said.

“I remember specifically mentioned James Bond,” said the Affidavit of O’Brien. “He said he would give me a monetary reward if I accepted to spy on the undulation of Deel.”

O’Brien said that he had agreed to work as Bouaziz secret agent inside the undulation, for $ 5,000 euros per month, equivalent to around $ 5,400 in US dollars.

After his first payment, via an application, Bouaziz’s father and DEEL financial director, Philippe Bouaziz, transferred the cryptocurrency transactions to make them more difficult to trace, said O’Brien in Affidavit.

“When it was time for me to be paid, I would send a picture of a watch to the payment cat, and Philippe said” sending this watch to London “, said the Affidavit. “Then he said” the buyer is happy “. I understood that this meant that Alex, the buyer of confidential information from Rippling, was satisfied with my services and the information that I had sent him, and that I would be paid. »»

Alex Bouaziz, particularly interested in Rippling expansion strategies, and sales information, marketing and customers, would tell O’Brien what terms to be sought in the internal courier system of Rippling, said Affidavit.

But in the meantime, according to the trial, the undulation had sought a suspected flight and had found suspicious research on its internal messaging system. The company began to follow the behavior of DS – allegedly O’Brien – the trial. RIPLING noted that the spy has downloaded information on its potential customers more than 1,300 times, as well as the visualization and downloading of hundreds of times customers, said the trial.

The undulation set the honey trap, said the trial.

At the beginning of last month, the chief lawyer of Rippling sent a letter to the chairman of the board of directors of Deel, his head of American legal affairs and a lawyer for a law firm used by Deel, said the trial. The letter included a screenshot invented by a message from the Rippling income director, Matt Plank, referring to a non -existent chain called “D -DEFECTORS” – to indicate that it was for the use of former Deel employees working at RIPLING.

It was, according to the trial, “bait”. Deel would have taken it. A few hours after sending the letter, DS began to seek Slack for the non -existent channel and the name of Plank, said the trial.

On March 12, Rippling obtained an order from the court in Ireland “leading the seizure and inspection of the DS telephone,” said the trial. The court ordered that the man should give his phone to an independent lawyer, in preparation for a hearing to determine if you can access the data from the aircraft, the trial said.

The lawyer appeared at the Dublin de Rippling office, ordered DS and told him that he had to postpone his phone. The trial alleged that DS fled to a bathroom and locked itself inside, “apparently in order to remove evidence.”

What has become DS and his phone after allegedly “out of the office and fled the premises” was not clearly indicated in the trial.

However, Affidavit allegedly fills the whites.

O’Brien said that at the end of February, Alex Bouaziz had told him to look for “D-Defectors”, but shortly after executing the request, sent him a message not to do the research because it was a “trap”. O’Brien replied that he had already searched the term, and Bouaziz responded with blasphemy, but then told him not to worry, and then continued to press O’Brien to send information on the Ondons, according to the Affidavit.

On March 14, the lawyer appeared with the court’s order and asked where the O’Brien aircraft said, the Affidavit said. “Although I had my phone in my pocket, I lied,” said O’Brien in the Affidavit, adding that he had then gone to the toilet and erased all the contents of his phone via a reset function.

Deel, he said, proposed to send him to him and his family to Dubai, and would protect him from legal responsibility and reward him financially if he kept silent.

Instead, he decided to turn against his alleged spymasters, said the Affidavit.

“I decided to cooperate,” he said, “after receiving an SMS from a friend on March 25, 2025 saying:” The truth will free you. “”