Pradeep Poonia wins Wolf Gupta court battle

Corporate companies try all tricks in the book to get more sales. If companies were to be 100% honest in their ads, 90% of marketing companies/teams would have lost work and world would have been a nice place to shop. But honesty is often the last option in any marketing campaigns. Idea is to get some sales done through misleading ads, exploring potential customers' fear of missing out and securing immediate sales based on unrealistic future dreams or impossible to achieve results.

EdTech start ups are in the news currently because of their misleading marketing campaigns aimed to exploit gullible middle class families into buying expensive tuition courses for their kids, often instigated by false pretext that the kid will earn millions before he/she grows up. 

One company, Whitehat Junior was in the limelight late 2020 because they claimed their students were bagging multi million dollar packages from Google and other such companies. 

When couple of individuals raised concerns against these unrealistic ads and sought proof, WhiteHatJr, which was recently acquired by BYJU's and full of cash, sought to suppress all criticism by filing defamation case against the whistleblowers- Pradeep Poonia and Anirudh Malpani in Delhi courts, seeking as much as 20 crores sighting damage to their reputation. This court case was after WhiteHatJr failed to suppress negative press even after getting twitter, youtube and linkedin Accounts suspended using their financial muscle. Instead of addressing the concerns raised by well wishing individuals and public, EdTech startup resorted to legal case, thinking such a measure would deter the whistleblower and any other future potential critic.

But Pradeep Poonia and Malpani chose to fight the battle in court. They had done nothing wrong and had nothing to fear. It did cause them immense mental stress, waste of time and money but they chose to fight for the right thing.  From the very first hearing WhiteHatJr was on backfoot. They didn't submit advertisement details, they admitted in their affidavit that Wolf Gupta is a ficticious character and hearing after hearing, only thing that happened was WhiteHatJr asking for new date. After 5 months, the EdTech startup has accepted defeat and has withdrawn the case, unable to prove themselves right and not being able to provide the evidence sought by court and Pradeep. Their billion dollar empire and army of lawyers couldn't hold fort against the power of truth.

More details here . You can also check Pradeep Poonia's social media handles for latest updates.

• Linked in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pradeep-poonia/
• Twitter: https://twittercom/pooniaV3

I had my own battle with big company once. Club Mahindra had sent a legal notice against me, to which I gave a proper response legally and they backed off. Details here.

I had another brush with ASCI- The agency responsible to ensure advertisements are fair and truthful. They had turned down my complaint against Honda Mobility false claims.

Also read: My tweet against Whitehat Jr that had gone viral.