An Irish man has admitted to accepting $5000 per month in cryptocurrency to spy on payroll management company Rippling on behalf of its competitor, Deel, in a Hollywood-esque corporate espionage scheme that captured global media attention and nearly led him to flee to Dubai. 

In an affidavit, signed on April 1 and filed in Dublin court, Keith O’Brien alleged he became a corporate spy for Deel last September, while he was still an employee of Rippling. 

Between September 2024 and March 2025, O’Brien allegedly used Telegram to feed Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz information about his employer’s corporate strategy and customer insights “multiple times a day every workday” and sometimes on the weekends, according to the sworn statement. 

“[Deel’s CEO] suggested that I remain at Rippling and become a ‘spy’ for Deel, and I recall him specifically mentioning James Bond,” O’Brien said in the statement. 

Deel executives paid O’Brien $5,000 in Ethereum per month for the espionage, telling their mole the payment method “would leave no trace,” according to O’Brien. The self-confessed spy said he reluctantly received the tokens in his Blockchain.com wallet, where he would liquify the funds and transfer them to his bank account because he was “concerned about cryptocurrency fluctuation.”

The admission comes a few weeks after Rippling sued Deel in a federal court in San Francisco for allegedly orchestrating “a calculated and unlawful corporate espionage scheme.” The legal drama marks the latest face-off between the HR software companies, which each notched valuations north of $10 billion a few years ago by specializing in solutions for managing remote work forces that have become less common in the post-pandemic era. 

The lawsuit also comes as the crypto industry is trying to rehabilitate its image, pushing back against popular narratives that assert digital assets are favored by bad actors seeking to conceal their crimes. 

Disclosure: DASTAN, Decrypt's parent company, was a client of Deel, and now holds a contract with Rippling.

O’Brien said in his statement that Bouaziz at times asked him to search for specific information pertaining to Rippling’s business through the firm’s Slack, Salesforce and Google Drive. The executive ordered O’Brien to plug search terms such as “Tom brady” “iran” “tinybird” and “sanctioned countries” into Rippling’s internal systems, according to the affidavit. 

The former spy also alleged that Bouaziz seemed particularly interested in information about Deel customers who had signed up for product demonstrations from Rippling. 

The alleged scheme ended in mid-March, when an independent solicitor served O’Brien a court order at Rippling’s Dublin office requiring inspection of the employee’s devices. That night, Deel’s lawyers spoke with O’Brien to explore the possibility of him fleeing with his family to Dubai.

A few days after being served, O’Brien also performed a factory reset on his phone, cut it up with an axe and threw it down a drain at his mother’s house at the direction of Deel’s lawyers.

However, he decided to confess to his alleged crimes nearly two weeks later. 

“I realized that I was harming myself and my family to protect Deel,” he said in the statement. “I was concerned, and I am still concerned about how wealthy and powerful [Deel’s executives] are, but…I want to do what I can to start making amends and righting these wrongs.”

Edited by James Rubin