"Jobfished" - tricked into working for a fake company
Ali Ayad is director of a company called Madbird, a glamorous design firm that employed 52 people. But the company wasn't as it appeared, and none of those working there knew.
The Zoom call had about 40 people on it - or that's what the people who had logged on thought. The all-staff meeting at the glamorous design agency had been called to welcome the growing company's newest recruits. Its name was Madbird and its dynamic and inspirational boss, Ali Ayad, wanted everyone on the call to be ambitious hustlers - just like him. But what those who had turned on their cameras didn't know was that some of the others in the meeting weren't real people. Yes, they were listed as participants. Some even had active email accounts and LinkedIn profiles. But their names were made up and their headshots belonged to other people. The whole thing was fake - the real employees had been "jobfished". Madbird's former workers were devastated. Some had spent as long as six months working for no pay. Now they were jobless in the middle of a pandemic, and struggling to even describe what had just happened to them. One of them was Steffie Nkoy-Nyama. The 麻豆社's Leo Sands has spent a year investigating what happened. For 5 Minutes On, Steffie tells Leo what the past year of her life has been like - and Leo reveals what he and his colleagues were able to discover during the investigation. The 麻豆社 wrote to give Ayad a chance to respond to the accusations fully. He replied, conceding that a "couple of points" he was being accused of were true - he wouldn't say which. He also said that the "majority" of the 24 separate points put to him in writing were "absurd and incorrect". He said he would respond more fully, but never did.
Image Credit: 麻豆社 News
