A former employee of SoftBank-backed messaging app IRL alleged in a legal filing that the company has inflated its user count and retaliated against him and other employees who raised concerns about the accuracy of its user numbers.
The former employee, Nicholas Grant, made the allegations in an unfair dismissal complaint he filed with the Welsh employment tribunal last month. Grant says in the filing, which The Information viewed, that IRL fired him two months after he told executives about incidents that led him to believe a high percentage of IRL’s users were bots.
