“What Secret Can You Reveal Now That Your NDA Has Expired?” (75 Stories)

Worked at JPMorgan.

Innocent people’s accounts were sometimes closed because fraud teams and investigators did not look deeply enough into transaction activity and customer information. I blame the company for not giving employees enough time to investigate and analyze cases properly. They are running through accounts and transactional history, due to time crunch and output metrics.

For example, they might see a “student” receiving $10,000 a month and assume money laundering, when in reality the funds were coming from relatives or a family member who was a doctor helping cover tuition and living expenses.

These somewhat rare unfortunate situations happened regularly, and over time the team became desensitized to them.

If your account was ever blocked or closed for no clear reason, this may be part of why.

The small company I worked for called itself "AI powered" for years and received hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of government grants for it despite doing literally nothing related to AI.

Activision, after merging with Blizzard in 2008, starting cooking the books like crazy to avoid paying taxes.

Dutch/Irish sandwich with 3 employees in NL, underreporting profits,...
They got caught and had to pay a 9 figure fine in France, as well as having to give each employee a decade worth of profit sharing (as profits were underreported) to then, 2 years later, fire everyone. Still during the Covid aftermath, after a year of record profits, due to "economic reasons".

All while having more money than they could spend.

Walked into a filming of The Great Food Truck Race where a guy hopped out of his truck while the line was long and pretended his generator failed. It was clearly staged and a man with a clipboard followed me down the sidewalk trying to get me to sign an NDA. Get lost, clipboard man.

I worked for a pyramid scheme that sold fake phone contracts and pretended they signed people up to new home phone and mobile plans (didn't find out it was fake until after I left). But really just took their money and invested heavily in customer support that would send you in a loop until you gave up.

At one of our corporate events they were giving out those huge novelty cheques to the "top earners" (remember pyramid scheme) it got so ridiculous, I'm talking into the millions for monthly earning, they had to stop the event because it was looking too suspicious to anyone with a brain.

The company eventually got found out but because they operated under shell corps they just changed the name and moved on under a different name. The kicker on top of all that is they called it Cobra, like the bad guys in GI Joe Cobra.

Did background work on a reality dating show once. Producers literally told two contestants to go outside and “accidentally” start an argument again because the cameras missed it the first time.

That as many as 10 different labels of paint, each with different price points and warranties, and brand names can come out of the same tank of paint.

Stop the filling line, pull out a pack of labels with one name, slap in a new pack with a different name and off you go.

I worked for a major airline and when your flight is "delayed due to mechanical issues" it's sometimes just because they oversold and need time to figure out who to bump. the plane is fine. the math just isn't mathing and they need an excuse that won't make people riot at the gate.

Much of what you hear on the radio on call in shows, prank shows, and general reality segments is fake and performed by actors. I was a contractor for a company that hired actors for this purpose. It was long enough ago that I don’t really remember all of what I did, but I clearly remember playing a person getting pranked by a radio show host. And I remember a scenario where another actor and myself had to pretend to have gone on a date that the show set up. The first one was a recording to air later (so we tried a bunch of different reactions and lines) and the second was live on air. It’s usually structured improvisation with a just a few details set.

Not technically under an NDA but I know something the company doesn’t want the public to know so I feel like it fits. I worked for Petsmart years ago and every holiday season they sell Chance and Lucky plushies for a donation drive. You buy one of the plushies for $5 and Petsmart will take it and donate it to a hospital or police station or whatever. The plushies cost Petsmart about $0.25 each, so every “donation” is $4.75 in Petsmarts pocket, as well as a tax write off since they’re donations. To top it off, all the plushies that don’t sell get donated regardless. Morally it’s pretty reprehensible, profiting off of donations to children hospitals and humanitarian shelters, especially when if you didn’t spend $5 on one it would go there regardless.

Autism Centers of America, also Autism Centers of (State name) provides extremely poor quality of services to their clients, often shutters locations without notifying staff, and is notorious for committing insurance fraud (multiple pending cases). Avoid at all costs!!!


They also create fake positive reviews wherever possible.

I worked on content moderation back in 2018 and your WhatsApp messages are not really private even though they say it’s encrypted end to end.

Sports betting. Almost all users lose in the end. The few who win are those whales who bet huge amounts on low but sure odds. Yes, sometimes they lose, but they outweigh those losses with all their previous winnings. Besides, the biggest prize I've seen in many years was $180,000. Don't gamble.

The autographed CDs and posters that you order from labels are mostly done by interns.

Job Centres in the UK used to have a points-based system for getting people into work. You'd get more points based on the clients' gender, ethnicity, and whether they had any disabilities.

Edit - this has blown up so I'll clarify. A healthy white male was worth 1 point. A disabled ethnic female was worth 12 points.

I just wanted to make it clear that I believe there should be zero discrimination, at all, across the board. We do, however, live in an imperfect world.

Underwood Ranch is using red dye in their sauces but not reporting it on the ingredients list because they're exploiting a current loophole in regulations. They know it's wrong and unethical and that eventually they'll have to declare it or exclude it, and both will hurt their business, but they want to rake in as much cash as possible before then.

This is actually pretty obvious to anyone who actually looks at their sauces. You don't naturally get that atomic red color. Every other sauce that's anywhere near that shade has coloring additives listed.

In 2015, after its founder Fred Deluca passed away; Subway had a corporate meeting where they announced that they had reduced the quality of their food as low as they possibly could resulting in X amount of dollars being saved. I watched an entire arena of franchisee’s stand up and cheer like they had just won the lottery. It was terrifying.

I wrote the first panoramic photo stitching algorithm native to the iPhone. I sold it to Microsoft in 2008, and they used it to power their app called Photosynth. I sold the whole codebase and patent for $75,000. I used that money to purchase most of a house.

I worked on a certain sc-fi show that starred a male and female duo who worked for the FBI. 

On a location shoot in a heritage building, the male lead was supposed to kick in a fake door we had made. He ended up kicking in one of the real location doors and got us banned from using that location in the future.

I also worked on another show where one of the lead actors had a mental breakdown and we had to shoot the last two episodes without him. There were lots of shots of his body double's back, as well as a couple deep fake shots where his face got pasted on in post. Watching the show, you might not notice, but if you go in with the actual knowledge, it's obvious as hell.

Im being vague because my NDAs don't technically expire, we just get to a point where no one cares.

Worked at a pharmacy a long time ago. Every employee was required to monitor the expiration date of a certain medicine category (usually seniors pharmacist would be responsible for psychiatric meds, a junior pharmacists for antibiotics and technicians would split the rest). A new retail pharmacist manager was hired. She forgot to put erectile disfunction meds on the board when splitting the responsibilities. We ended up selling expired Viagra for a month or so. No clientes noticed.