I thought I heard signal but that is encrypted, which I guess doesn't really matter if you invite the right (or wrong) person to the group chat.

It is encrypted, but is it suitable for military operations? :D And yeah - human errors are the biggest weakness of digital security.

I also heard instead of owning the mistake they took the road of saying the reporter works for a crappy paper.

They have been attacking mercilessly, which is why he released the full texts that prove they are lying. It is poor PR.

I was horrible at sales for that very reason. I couldn't lie to customers.

The interesting thing about the approach I took, was we ended up being the most trusted place in the city, so we were pulling customers from competitors. We had no reason to lie either, as we didn't work on commission, and most employees didn't know which items were more valuable or not to sell.