A rumor that circulated online in August 2025 claimed retail giant Walmart fired an executive for taking $30,000 in daily kickbacks from an Indian staffing agency — essentially an alleged scheme shipping U.S. jobs to India.
For example, on Aug. 25, an X user posted (archived), "BREAKING - A Walmart executive has been fired after taking $30K+ daily in kickbacks from Indian staffing agencies, funneling jobs to Indian nationals while shutting out American workers and abruptly locking out 1,200 contractors." The post received more than 3.2 million views.
(@Rightanglenews/X)
A similar popular Facebook post (archived) featured the claim with the same text. Other users also shared this rumor on Bluesky (archived), Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Reddit (archived), Threads, TikTok (archived) and X (archived).
(Terrence K Williams/Facebook)
As of this writing, Snopes uncovered no credible evidence to either confirm or debunk the details of this rumor. Rather, several online articles partially originated this matter, including on some websites featuring stories hosting text resembling writing generated by artificial intelligence.
Prior to those articles, the rumor appeared — possibly in its earliest form — as hearsay in an Aug. 19 post (archived) on Blind — a website offering professionals a platform to anonymously discuss job-related matters. That Blind post offered no evidence to support the claim, and simply read, "Massive fraud at Walmart. Rumor has it that a VP was fired due to getting kickbacks. I'm also hearing that all contractors -1200? from a subcontractor got terminated."
We contacted Walmart's corporate media relations team to ask if they could speak on the rumor. In response, Walmart spokesperson Nick DeMoss pointed us to an X post from Dan Bartlett, the company's executive vice president of corporate affairs. In Bartlett's Aug. 25 post (archived), he said that, earlier in August, Walmart terminated a vendor and "a small number of U.S.-based associates." He also added that the investigation leading to the terminations "had nothing to do" with H-1B visas — an aspect of the rumor featured in the online articles.
In our communication with the company's corporate team, we did not receive any further answers regarding specifics related to the firings Bartlett referenced.
Digging into the rumor
In our initial searches for more information, we noted Bing (screenshot) and DuckDuckGo (screenshot) displayed AI-generated answers above search results, seemingly confirming the rumor as true. Meta AI also said much the same (screenshot), in a search prompted simply by our curiosity to see whether other AI platforms also misleadingly presented the story. Those AI-presented answers cited sources (screenshot) including for example articles published on the websites ctol.digital, revolver.news and webpronews.com. (Searches of Google and Yahoo did not produce similar AI-drawn conclusions.)
The authors of the articles on revolver.news and webpronews.com both cited ctol.digital's story as a primary source. The Aug. 22 article from ctol.digital — a website belonging to an alleged Switzerland-based company named CTOL Digital Solutions — displayed the headline, "The Weekend Purge: How Walmart's Kickback Scandal Exposes Silicon Valley's Staffing Underground." The body of the story cited "sources familiar with the investigation," and did not offer any specifics.
The purported AI text-detection websites Copyleaks, GPTZero, NoteGPTo, Phrasly, QuillBot, Scribbr and ZeroGPT all displayed estimates indicating the articles on ctol.digital and webpronews.com contained AI-generated text, either in part or in whole. In performing these scans, we noted that, in 2023, MIT Sloan Teaching & Learning Technologies reported, "AI detection software is far from foolproof — in fact, it has high error rates and can lead instructors to falsely accuse students of misconduct." We also note to readers that the articles' AI-generated feel prompted us to scan the stories in the first place, and that the webpronews.com article featured an AI-generated image of an Indian man.
For example, the webpronews.com article ended with two paragraphs similar to how generative-AI often attempts to wrap a bow on the end of an article, including forward-thinking thoughts. The paragraphs said the "episode" about the alleged fired executive "serves as a cautionary tale," and talks of how Walmart will need to "navigate restoring trust." The ending also mentions "contractors facing uncertain futures."
On the Y Combinator website's Hacker News forum, a user commenting (archived) about the ctol.digital article submitted the idea that the story's publisher possibly used the Blind thread as the basis for an AI-generated article. They also pointed out the absence of the allegedly fired Walmart executive's name.
We contacted by email the owners of ctol.digital and webpronews.com to ask about the accuracy of their stories, as well as inquire about their potential usage of AI to write their articles. Shortly after contacting webpronews.com, their article disappeared, with the former link redirecting to another Walmart article also featuring yet another AI-generated image.
For further reading in the realm of corporate matters, another fact check examined the false and unfounded claims about the Meijer supermarket chain allegedly firing a 16-year-old autistic, food-insecure deli worker — purportedly following a company-led investigation lasting months — for supposedly taking and eating discarded food.