Woman behind viral LinkedIn post with fake Indian-origin CEO claims she was blackmailed

Janney Hujic claims her LinkedIn post about meeting a man she thought was former DBS CEO Piyush Gupta was posted by her social media manager without approval.

A Singaporean woman who went viral after she posted a long LinkedIn post detailing a "chance encounter" with an Indian-origin CEO has broken her silence over the whole incident. Janney Hujic shared a picture of herself with a man she identified as former DBS CEO Piyush Gupta in Bali. She said she met the chief executive unexpectedly and the two discussed her upcoming project. However, Gupta quickly set the record straight and clarified that the man in the picture was not him. “Sorry to disillusion you. That isn’t me!" he wrote.

Janney Hujic met a man with a striking resemblance to Piyush Gupta, former CEO of DBS Bank.

The now-deleted post led to Hujic being trolled online, but now she claims she was not the one to share the post. In an interview with 8World News on Saturday, she alleged that her social media manager put up the post and demanded money to remove it, a report by Mothership said.

Blackmailed over post?

Hujic revealed that she had hired a freelance social media manager in the Philippines to take care of her Instagram and LinkedIn presence, and they were paid a dollar for every like she received on her posts. She claimed the manager had access to her photos and shared them without her permission to attract traffic.

After the post went viral, the freelancer locked her out of her account and demanded S$5,000 to delete the post. “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,” read a screenshot of a conversation seen by 8World News.

Locked out of social media

Hujic added that the freelancer timed the post with her cave exploration trip in Vietnam when she had no internet access. When she returned, she claimed she was locked out of her social media accounts.

She added that the manager was paid money, but she could still not access her social media accounts.

She said she had approached the man in the photo, later identified as Kumar H Subramaniam, as he looked strikingly similar to Gupta and clicked a picture to share as a joke with friends. 8World News revealed that they were shown that she shared the photo on her Instagram story as an apparent joke.

Her story matches Subramaniam's, who had earlier revealed that when he corrected her after she mistook him for Gupta, she asked for a photo anyway to prank her friends. “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, adding, “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."