It's been a rough few months for Clinkle, a stealth payment app that was able to raise $25 million— the largest seed round in Silicon Valley history — pre-launch.
First, the company went through a series of layoffs. There have also been angry posts on Quora published by former employees.
Plus, buzz surrounding Clinkle has not been great because so few people understand how it's supposed to work.
Now, despite the fact that the app hasn't launched yet, Clinkle has been hacked. A group of hackers revealed employees' names, profile pictures and phone numbers. The hack also revealed a ridiculous profile picture of Lucas Duplan, the startup's 20-something founder, holding a fake bundle of cash amounting to $30,000.
We asked Clinkle about the photo's back-story and hacking. A company spokesperson confirmed that the cash was fake. "It was a playful, self-deprecating picture used as a profile picture among Clinkle employees," this person said.
One of the hackers was a former intern at a competitive payment company, Venmo, says the spokesperson.
"We tracked the activity and Andrew [A.], former Venmo intern, was responsible for accessing the information,' the Clinkle spokesperson told Business Insider. The intern attends Stanford, where Clinkle's founder also went to school. We agreed not to identify the man by his last name for legal reasons.
"That said, only names, phone numbers, photos, and Clinkle unique IDs were accessible. He also entered our system in September and exposed our screen shots," says the spokesperson.
Venmo did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
