More information is coming out about some of the personal battles Fahim Saleh, founder and CEO of Gokada has gone through before he was gruesomely murdered in his million-dollar condo in Manhattan.
According to a report by NYdailynews, Fahim made a name for himself by creating a prank phone call app that led to the downfall of a Hudson County, N.J. jail honcho.
According to the report, Fahim Saleh’s app, PrankDial, allowed a user to set up a call between two other people and then secretly listen in.
Kirk Eady, the former deputy director of Hudson County Correctional Facility, was sentenced to 21 months in prison in Sept. 2015 for “illegally wiretapping” employees critical of his job performance. Eady has an ongoing lawsuit against Saleh and others for misleading him about the legality of the app, which he used to secretly monitor his critics.
Saleh wrote in a 2018 Medium post that PrankDial began as a passion project inspired by his love of prank calls when he was young.
PrankDial relied on users not to make calls to 11 states where the app’s service was illegal. The app was an instant hit and generated up to $2 million annually, he wrote.
“Over its lifetime, PrankDial.com has generated more than $10 million,” Saleh wrote. “No joke.”
However, the app was no laughing matter for Eady. The former jail official used PrankDial’s “evil operator” function to monitor communications between Hudson County jail union officials and the operator of a website critical of jail management.
“Eady used Evil Operator to initiate calls between them and secretly record the resulting conversations. Eady then retaliated against the union members by changing their work schedules, placing anonymous calls to their spouses accusing them of infidelity, and registering one of them as a member of the Ku Klux Klan,” judges at the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in 2016, affirming Eady’s conviction.
Eady sued Saleh and other corporate defendants last year, claiming PrankDial misled him about its legality. The suit noted that Eady lost his job and pension. He sought damages no less than $10 million.
Efforts to reach Eady were unsuccessful. A call to his attorney was not returned. A call to the chief operating officer of PrankDial was not returned.
