Woman Blames Manager For Viral LinkedIn Post Misidentifying DBS Bank's Ex-CEO

A Singapore woman, who in a LinkedIn post identified a stranger as former DBS Bank CEO Piyush Gupta, has now broken her silence over the viral claim. This came after Mr Gupta clarified he wasn't in the picture. "Sorry to disillusion you. That isn't me!" he wrote in the comments section of the post.

In an interview with 8World News, Janney Hujic, a Singapore resident, claimed her freelance social media manager posted it without her consent to gain traffic.

She alleged that the manager, based in the Philippines, even blackmailed her for S$5,000 (approx. Rs 3.08 lakhs) based on the number of likes. Ms Hujic added the freelancer was paid one dollar for every like her posts received.

Narrating the incident, Ms Hujic said her manager, whom she hired in March to manage her Instagram and LinkedIn, posted the story without her permission when she was on a cave trip to Vietnam with no internet connection.

When she came into the network zone area, she found the freelancer had changed her LinkedIn password and she couldn't log back in, according to a report in Mothership.

She even shared the screenshot of the blackmailed message, which was accessed by Mothership, that read, "Post has over 6k engagement. Pay me 5k SGD and I take down. Profile now is down. I changed access and all. When I get paid I give you back access."

Ms Hujic said that on her trip, she approached the man, identified as Kumar H Subramaniam, who resembled Mr Gupta. She clicked a picture and shared it as a joke among her friends in a group, which also included her freelance social media manager.

When she regained access to the internet on May 24, she found that she was being heavily trolled online. By then, her freelance social media manager had logged her out of her LinkedIn account.

Speaking with Mothership, Mr Kumar, the man in the picture, said he was having lunch with a colleague at a cafe in Bali when he was approached. She showed him a picture and asked if he was Mr Gupta.

"She and her guy mentioned that they had worked at DBS before and we joked about her pranking her friends that she had bumped into Mr Gupta by chance in public while on their holiday here," he said.

"I never, at any point, said that I was indeed Mr Gupta. I never agreed for my picture to promote any business or social ventures on anyone," he said.