A man alleged in a lawsuit to be a corporate spy who stole secrets from a Bay Area technology firm on behalf of its arch rival says in a court filing that the plan was hatched as a James Bond-style operation.
Heavyweight workforce-management software startups Rippling and Deel are locked in a legal battle over claims by Rippling that Deel cultivated a spy in its Irish office who was caught with a “honeypot” trap.
The San Francisco companies, according to reports on their valuations, are both “decacorns” worth $10 billion or more, and have made their rivalry public through dueling announcements mentioning each other by name.
Rippling sued Deel last month in San Francisco U.S. District Court, describing the alleged mole only as “D.S.” for “Deel spy.”
Now, a man named Keith O’Brien has claimed in a sworn affidavit in Irish court that he was the spy, and that the skullduggery included coded communications like “send that watch to London” that could appear in a Bond movie.
Deel did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A Deel spokesperson earlier denied “all legal wrongdoing.”
O’Brien, according to the affidavit he made under oath, had worked at Rippling’s Dublin, Ireland office since July 2023 on global payroll and compliance products, and sought to jump ship to Deel in March of last year. He went through the application process but was rejected, the affidavit said.
In September, while still at Rippling but seeking consulting work with Deel, O’Brien contacted Deel co-founder and CEO Alex Bouaziz and told him he was thinking of leaving Rippling to focus on consulting. Bouaziz suggested a phone call, and the two talked, the affidavit said.
“I recall him specifically mentioning James Bond,” O’Brien’s affidavit said. “He said he would offer me a monetary reward if I agreed to spy on Rippling for Deel.”
O’Brien claimed he agreed to work as Bouaziz’s secret agent inside Rippling, for $5,000 euros a month, equivalent to about $5,400 in U.S. dollars.
After his first payment, via an app, Bouaziz’s father and Deel chief financial officer Philippe Bouaziz switched the transactions to cryptocurrency to make them harder to trace, O’Brien claimed in the affidavit.
“When it was time for me to be paid, I would send a picture of a watch to the payment chat, and Philippe would say ‘send that watch to London,'” the affidavit claimed. “Then he would say ‘the buyer is happy.’ I understood this to mean that Alex, the buyer of Rippling’s confidential information, was happy with my services and the information I had sent him, and that I would be getting paid.”
Alex Bouaziz, especially interested in Rippling’s expansion strategies, and information about sales, marketing and customers, would tell O’Brien what terms to search for in Rippling’s internal messaging system, the affidavit claimed.
But meanwhile, according to the lawsuit, Rippling had been searching for a suspected leaker, and found suspicious searches on its internal messaging system. The company began tracking the behavior of D.S. — allegedly O’Brien — the lawsuit said. Rippling found that the spy downloaded information about its potential clients more than 1,300 times, along with viewing and downloading customer information hundreds of times, the lawsuit claimed.
Rippling laid the honeypot trap, the lawsuit said.
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It was, according to the lawsuit, “bait.” Deel allegedly snapped it up. Within hours after the letter was sent, D.S. began searching Slack for the non-existent channel, and for Plank’s name, the lawsuit claimed.
On March 12, Rippling obtained a court order in Ireland “directing seizure and inspection of D.S.’s phone,” the lawsuit said. The court ordered that the man must give his phone to an independent lawyer, in preparation for a hearing to determine whether Rippling could access the device’s data, the lawsuit said.
The lawyer showed up at Rippling’s Dublin office, gave the order to D.S. and told him he must hand over his phone. The lawsuit alleged D.S. fled to a bathroom and locked himself inside, “seemingly in order to delete evidence.”
What became of D.S. and his phone after he allegedly “stormed out of the office and fled the scene” was not made clear in the lawsuit.
However, the affidavit purportedly fills in the blanks.
O’Brien claimed that at the end of February, Alex Bouaziz told him to search for “d-defectors,” but soon after running the query sent him a message not to do the search because it was a “trap.” O’Brien responded that he had already searched the term, and Bouaziz responded with a profanity, but then told him not to worry, and afterward, continued to press O’Brien to send information on Rippling, the affidavit alleged.
On March 14, the lawyer appeared with the court order, and asked where O’Brien’s devices were, the affidavit said. “Although I had my phone in my pocket, I lied,” O’Brien said in the affidavit, adding that he then went to the bathroom and erased all the contents on his phone via a reset function.
Deel, he claimed, proposed sending him and his family to Dubai, and would shield him from legal liability and reward him financially if he kept quiet.
Instead, he resolved to turn against his alleged spymasters, the affidavit said.
“I decided to cooperate,” he said, “after I got a text from a friend on March 25, 2025 saying, ‘the truth will set you free.'”
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