Jquery php request is returning a weird result

The following wasn’t wrong for me:

$data = $wpdb->get_results( $wpdb->prepare( "SELECT * FROM $dbtable WHERE name = $name" ) );

It should be:

$data = $wpdb->get_results( $wpdb->prepare( "SELECT * FROM {$dbtable} WHERE name = %s", $name ) );

Then you can just die(); at the end of the function like:

if( count( $data ) >= 1 ){
    die( 'true' );
} else {
    die( 'false' );
}