Pradeep Poonia found plotting to tarnish WhiteHat Jr’s reputation

WhiteHat Jr, an ed-tech start-up where kids are taught to code online, has been in the news over the last four weeks, mostly negative, for a variety of reasons. Whether it was the CIC’s take on who made the Arogya Setu app, where Twitter exploded with references of the now famous Chintu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjmGvPD5A7s) as the probable inventor of the app, or the Advertising Standard Council of India (ASCI) asking WhiteHat Jr to pull down at five of its ads as they were in potential violation of the ASCI Code. In response, WhiteHat Jr quickly changed the ad campaign, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C15fGYzTcQ&feature=youtu.be) and and brought their Silicon Valley Challenge to the fore, focussing on the end product that it is delivering – children making apps (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p60pTCs6puY_).

However, the spate of negativity against the start-up continued, which appeared a bit suspicious. Delving into the issue, one individual was found to be behind most of the negative campaign. A person called Pradeep Poonia, a former Cisco employee, was found to be proactively reaching out to the media sharing stories against WhiteHat Jr. Digging further led to the discovery of an underground social group, called ‘Byju’s A Menace’, on Telegram, which was found to be plotting against WhiteHat Jr on a daily basis. Poonia was found to be encouraging everyone to take all kinds of action including, illegal and unethical ones, targeting WhiteHat Jr.

The actions included fake booking of free classes everyday on WhiteHat Jr and harassing the teachers. Poonia also encouraged people to make recordings of the classes. A company spokesperson told Adgully that 200 of such fake booking of classes had happened, which wasted a lot of time of the teachers who could otherwise have been teaching deserving children coding.

Poonia had initially seemed to have received support for his audacity, but now people are beginning to wonder as to the motive behind his targeting a start-up involved in giving children an early edge in coding.

When contacted a WhiteHat Jr spokesperson confirmed to Adgully, “We have seen a continuous and planned attack by a select group of people who plot online leveraging tools such as Telegram and decide their daily attack strategy on WhiteHat Jr. The precious time of our highly qualified teachers is wasted attending to almost 200 such malicious intent trial classes every day. It also raises issue of security of women.”

“Besides, we have also come across morphed advertisements/ videos floating around on social media, which is a clear case of infringement of copyright issues,” the spokesperson added.