Ex-Employee Alleges Singapore AI Startup Asked Malaysian Staff to Pose as Singaporeans

A former team lead of a Singapore-based AI startup has gone public with explosive allegations that the company instructed Malaysian employees to pretend to be Singaporeans when speaking with clients, among a litany of other workplace misconduct claims. The Reddit post, which has since gone viral on r/Singapore, paints a picture of a so-called AI firm that the employee describes as "really just a ChatGPT wrapper consultancy" run by a CEO who allegedly considers himself "above the law."

The ex-employee, posting under the username u/bwfiq, detailed a series of troubling incidents during their tenure. Malaysian staff were reportedly given Singapore phone numbers and told to fake being Singaporeans for client-facing roles — a directive that carries legal risks around employment fraud and CPF compliance. The startup is also accused of ignoring sexual harassment complaints, stealing and reselling vendor data, and deliberately assigning work at 5:30 pm to coerce unpaid overtime. Multiple commenters claiming to be former or current employees corroborated the accounts, adding that the company had seen complete team overhauls multiple times and that new joiners were instructed not to speak with employees serving notice.

The story takes an even darker turn with allegations about the CEO's wife serving as the part-time head of HR. According to the post, the company's credit card — linked to the CEO wife's personal email — expired without being updated, causing the company to lose its entire website domain and email system irretrievably. The employee worked through the night to migrate everything to a new domain, only to be fired a week later alongside his entire team. None of them received their final month's salary.

Singapore employment law is clear on several of these allegations: failure to pay salary and CPF contributions is a criminal offence, and instructing employees to misrepresent their nationality to clients could constitute fraud. The company has not been named in the original Reddit post, though commenters speculated on its identity. The Independent Singapore has contacted the firm for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.

Why it matters for Singapore: This case is a wake-up call for the city-state's booming AI startup scene. As Singapore aggressively positions itself as Asia's AI hub, stories like this erode trust in the ecosystem and highlight the regulatory gaps that can emerge when fast-moving startups outpace basic governance. The incident also underscores the risks for Singapore's reputation as a trusted business destination — clients who unknowingly deal with misrepresented teams may think twice about engaging Singapore-based AI services in the future.