How Wipro caught moonlighting? This viral tweet explains

IT major Wipro recently fired 300 employees for moonlighting, the tern used for working with other companies at the same time. Though moonlighting is not new, the trend of side hustles has become widespread in the past two years. But with two different laptops, and working from the comfort of home, in the hometown, many wondered how the company came to know about such a large number of employees working concurrently. A stock market investor has explained on Twitter how the company might have caught the "moonlighters" off-guard, with just a click of a button.

The theory, tweeted by stock market investor Rajiv Mehta, has gone viral on the social media and you would be surprised to know how companies caught the employees so easily.

“Same competency, double delivery. Two different laptops, same WiFi, catering to two different clients — all from the comfort of own home, in own hometown. It was impossible to catch them. Then who caught them?” he wrote in a thread while revealing the secret method companies applied to catch moonlighters.


He reveled that the "The most innocent looking, unassuming — provident fund contribution" was apparently the reason how the employees were identified.


Provident fund (PF) is a government's retirement corpus under which companies have to mandatorily deduct a part of employee's salary, and make a equal contribution in the employee's PF account. It is mandatory and its violation is a serious offence.

According to the Twitter thread shared by Mehta, "As all Aadhaar, PAN numbers are taken by banks to open salary account and the same are used to deposit PF… Systems are so beautifully integrated at the backend that it was next to impossible for these moonlighters to create two identities both financially and demographically."

According to him, the PF authorities use a "daily de-duplication algorithm to check if someone has paid double mistakenly,". This was where the dual employment was discovered. "They discovered that there exist accounts of persons with many donors," he wrote.

Mehta said the “entire Bhanumati ka kunaba came down crashing” after this duplication “was reported to companies”.

Although he didn't explain how he came to know about this but the theory has gone viral. The thread has received over 10,000 likes and more than 2400 retweets.

Technology and software companies in India are divided on whether to allow their employees to moonlight for other companies while still being on their payrolls or not.

While some like Tech Mahindra have supported the idea of side hustles, others like IBM, Wipro have flagged concerns about it.

Wipro’s executive chairman Rishad Premji had taken a tough stance against moonlighting and termed it as “cheating”. He had also said that 300 employees were terminated as they were working for competitors while still being on the company’s payroll.

Premji had last month said he's been getting "hate mail" over the firings. But, he insisted, that secretly working for rivals is “Cheating, plain and simple".

The country's largest IT services exporter TCS said moonlighting is an "ethical issue" and against its core values but has not taken any action against any staff.