The Elaborate Con That Tricked Dozens Into Working for a Fake Design Agency

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 Madbird, a "glamorous design agency" had been called to welcome the growing company's newest recruits. 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. They were listed as participants, and as the BBC reports, 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." From the report: The company had not been "shipping products and experiences locally and globally for 10 years" as it had claimed. In fact, Ali Ayad only registered Madbird with Companies House on the same day he interviewed Chris Doocey to be a sales manager - 23 September 2020. 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.

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