Rippling sues Deel over spying

The honeypot story seems so weird:

> So, to confirm Deel’s involvement, Rippling’s General Counsel sent a legal letter to Deel’s senior leadership identifying a recently established Slack channel called “d-defectors,” in which (the letter implied) Rippling employees were discussing information that Deel would find embarrassing if made public. In reality, the “d-defectors” channel was not used by Rippling employees and contained no discussions at all. ... Yet, just hours after Rippling sent the letter to Deel’s executives and counsel, Deel’s spy searched for and accessed the #d-defectors channel—proving beyond any doubt that Deel’s top leadership, or someone acting on their behalf, had fed the information on the #d-defectors channel to Deel’s spy inside Rippling.

I am sending legal letter to someone warning them that I have dirt on them AND am also mentioning where the dirt is. And that didn't ring any warning bells to Deel's management? Just wow, if true. If they are truly this incompetent, they have no business doing corporate espionage.

IMO this is going to create a wave of product offerings from security startups that "monitor for corporate espionage" similar to what Meta was doing tracking copy/paste into whats app, but do it across all apps. Like detect for seldom searched keywords, etc.

link to complaint: https://rippling2.imgix.net/Complaint.pdf

Really worth the full read.

Is it known how Rippling obtained information about D.S.' Slack activity? Does Slack provide this information or did Rippling obtain this information by running third party monitoring software on D.S.' machine?

Agree, the entire complaint is fascinating reading. I suspect Deel's responses will mostly be "we deny everything," but any counter-arguments they make will also be very interesting.

I have to say, I think if this was just limited to the Slack previewing behavior, it's unlikely it would have been caught. Previewing Slack channels is not particularly unusual or suspicious behavior and many people, probably most, don't even think of it as being something that'd be logged. (I personally didn't think of it until reading this post, but in retrospect, of course it is. Everything is.)

Crossing the line into dumb things like Deel executives personally contacting the spy's subordinates via their personal phone numbers, which he had no way of knowing is like sending up a massive flare of weirdness. I'm not saying loyalty to one's employer is everything, or even particularly important, but if I was randomly headhunted by a C-level from a direct competitor, who I had never spoken to or expressed interest in, I'd be pretty suspicious, and I'd find it underhanded. I might mention it to someone.

Supposing the allegations are substantially true, I wonder why Deel felt comfortable going that far. Maybe underestimation of competition?

> I'm sure the CEO will try to have plausible deniability

I'm not so sure, this is very damning

I use Deel to hire people internationally. It's mostly an EOR company. They promised a lot though, I once thought about moving my entire HR workflow to Deel (even for local employees), but quickly decided against it.

Rippling is a PEO

https://www.rippling.com/peo

My company uses it. When you work for a company that uses Rippling, you are “co- employed” by both your company and Rippling. Your company does everything as far as hiring, firing, HR, management, etc.

But as far as taxes, insurance and benefits, you “work for” Rippling. It allows small companies to have the benefits of a larger company. Your company pays the PEO per head. It also serves as an SSO provider. Another startup I worked for in the past used Insperity.

I don't know Rippling, but Deel is widely adopted over here in Brazil for startups hiring international workers.

Be thankful you've never heard of Deel. It's the worst PEO I've ever used, by an extremely wide margin, having used 3 others.

If you've never worked at a company that uses rippling or deel you wouldn't. They are niche HR tools, mostly targeting smaller companies.

If you don't hire (or are hired) internationally (across jurisdictions), then it makes sense if you have never heard of them.

This is gold, and hilarious. I get why someone would "spy" on rippling for money, but my god, don't use a phone. And why would you even need to be on prem to do this kind of spying? There are so many better ways.

Fontaines H.C.

OK, but why is this relevant?

I can't believe I'm about to defend a HR payroll systems.... but I wouldn't call Rippling or Deel "crapware". We use both; they're boring but necessary products, and they do their job well.

[Edit: Added Deel, since we use both! Also hello to the Rippling salesperson who is reading this and is about to reach out to me to convince us to switch.]

If you have a reasonably competent sales team, you don't need "spying", you just ask the customers about their experience with the competitor.

Any reasonably company both shops around and is happy to throw one provider under any number of buses if it gets them a better deal with another provider.

Yikes! Good ol’ honeypot, works all the time.

Any specific reason you believe that Deel was founded by spies or is your statement based on some general principle?

Why are you saying it is Israeli? The wiki says it is American?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deel_Inc.

> How did Deel start? What’s your story? I'm originally from France. I lived in Israel, the U.K., the U.S., and Spain. Similarly, my co-founder, Shuo, was born and raised in Beijing. -Alex Bouaziz

who says that? i have never heard the saying

maybe the they got to the paranoid and induced chest pains so they could never share their saying?

We use Plane.com, as they are one of the few companies that support hiring in Palestine. Deel doesn't even list Palestine on their countries page, which tells you a lot about their ethics.

As a contractor being paid through deel, I don't have any issues, and it's much more convenient for me than what my employer used before. Useful features have been added over the past few years, though I don't like the most recent UI refresh.

I can have multiple accounts in different countries, and configure percentages to be paid out automatically to each of my bank accounts. European tranfers typically arrive almost instantly, to Ecuador typically arrive the next day, sometimes the same day. It's all fairly convenient.

A journalist using private slack messages as a source reached out for comment on the story.

In the actual filing, it is shown that a journalist was in possession of screenshots of internal Rippling Slack messages, which is what prompted the investigation.