Storyboard18 | Fake design agency Madbird duped dozens of people into joining the firm with fake employees

UK-based Madbird hired people to work on a commission-only basis for the first six months - as of February 2021, the fake design company hadn't signed a single client contract.

A digital design company called Madbird run by social media influencer Ali Ayad conned hundreds of its employees, reported BBC. It has also produced a documentary, Jobfished, on the investigation.

During the year-long investigation, the BBC tracked and spoke to several people across the world whom the company hired but never paid.

While fake employees reportedly would appear on the company's Zoom calls, several senior employees listed on the company's website didn't appear to work at Madbird.

Madbird hired people in multiple countries, including India, across various functions including sales, design and operations. Every new joinee was instructed to work from home - messaging over email and speaking to each other on Zoom.

In a bid to tap into a global market, Madbird's HR department posted job ads online for an international sales team based out of Dubai. At least a dozen people from India, Uganda, South Africa, the Philippines and elsewhere were hired, the BBC report stated.

The co-founder Ali Ayda’s identity and his life story were not consistent. He claimed to have been a creative designer at Nike apart from having worked a stint at fashion brand's Oregon headquarters in the US. It was where he'd met Dave Stanfield, Madbird's other co-founder. Ali Ayad has over 90,000 followers on Instagram and he describes himself as an "influencer" in his bio.

Madbird hired people to work on a commission-only basis for the first six months. It was only after they passed their probation period that they would be put on a salary - about $47,300 for most. Until then, they would only earn a percentage of every deal they negotiated. By February 2021, not a single client contract had been signed. None of the Madbird staff had been paid.

Here’s an extract from the BBC’s investigation report:

At least six of the most senior employees profiled by Madbird were fake. Their identities stitched together using photos stolen from random corners of the internet and made-up names. They included Madbird’s co-founder, Dave Stanfield - despite him having a LinkedIn profile and Ali referring to him constantly. Some of the duped staff had even received emails from him. Ali told one employee that if they wanted to get in touch with Mr Stanfield they should email him, because he was too busy with projects for Nike to jump on a call.

Using facial recognition technology we were able to match Dave Stanfield’s headshot to its actual owner - a Prague-based beehive maker named Michal Kalis. When we tracked Michal down, he confirmed he had never heard of Madbird, Ali Ayad or Dave Stanfield.

The BBC report said that Ali Ayad was claiming complete ignorance. But, as the company's director, he said he would still take full responsibility. He promised to remove Madbird's website and pause all ongoing work "until we fix this".

"I have put 16 hours every single day for months and done the best that I could to make this work. I should've known better and for that I'm truly sorry," he said.

Madbird's website went offline, and Ali's LinkedIn profile vanished, leaving its real employees in lurch.

Increasingly, recruitment scam has become an order of the day especially with Covid-related disruption forcing companies to operate remotely. A senior India-based journalist Nidhi Razdan has also become a victim of a recruitment scam. In June 2020, she had quit from a NDTV India news channel after informing that she had secured a job as a professor at Harvard University.

In a blog post in December 2021, Razdan disclosed that she has become a victim of a cybercrime which has left her angry, shocked and disappointed as she came to know about the truth behind the job offer from Harvard University.