Don’t Panic co-founder Joe Wade looks back at the strangest news in adland this week… a fake design agency.
Netflix’s Inventing Anna, which features a woman with a dodgy accent pretending to be a German heiress to swindle Manhattan’s elite, has been a huge hit. This tale of decadence and deception is by no means a new phenomenon, with countless similar stories being told over the years, from Catch Me If You Can to The Talented Mr Ripley.
They generally feature a fraudster faking their way into a life of wealth and luxury, be that Leonardo Dicaprio pretending he’s a pilot or Jude Law pretending he can act. So, what exactly was Ali Ayad doing when he fooled over 50 people into thinking they were working for… a design agency?
In this less than glamorous true story, Ayad, an influencer with over 90,000 Instagram followers, created a fake agency called Madbird as part of an incredibly elaborate network of lies, ultimately just to hoodwink a bunch of people into doing a bit of design work.
During the height of the pandemic, with many desperate for employment, he painstakingly produced a host of fake employees with fake LinkedIn profiles, leading inspiring video calls and sending emails from numerous made-up accounts.
The profile picture he used for his fake managing director was actually that of a Czech beehive maker, while for one of his graphic designers he used a stock image that comes up when you Google ’ginger man’. After almost six months of this charade, a…
