In an affidavit released earlier today, the spy who was allegedly stealing sensitive information from HR tech company Rippling on behalf of Deel, one of its primary competitors, made a number of shocking confessions. From reportedly coordinating directly with Deel’s CEO Alex Bouaziz, to sending images of watches to someone known only as “The Watchman” in order to initiate payments, to the CFO of Deel (Philippe Bouaziz, Alex’s father) incredibly believing that Ethereum transfers would leave “no trace.” Oops! This instance of a multi-billion-dollar B2B SaaS company (allegedly) employing a spy to serve as an underpaid, Slack-searching James Bond, however, is just the newest episode in a longer tale of ongoing tech espionage — welcome to the perennial spy season.

Corporate espionage, in recent times, has been perceptually dominated by high-profile instances of foreign infiltration into tech companies. While the epidemic of Chinese spies in Silicon Valley is now a generally accepted fact, Peter Thiel faced significant backlash as recently as 2019 for implying that Google was “thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence” and that its AI-related trade secrets were being siphoned away into the hands of Xi Jinping. This, of course, is exactly what happened. Earlier this year, former Google software engineer Linwei Ding was charged by a federal grand jury for stealing artificial-intelligence trade secrets from Google on behalf of Chinese companies. Lascivious rumors of bombshell Chinese women approaching less-than-conventionally-attractive software engineers working in AI and defense tech have abounded. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, said this month that he believes Chinese spies may already be stealing “$100 million secrets that are a few lines of code.” The U.S. Committee on Homeland Security stated in a report from October of 2024 that “there have been over 55 CCP-related espionage cases” between February 2021 and August 2024.