Friday, April 14th, 2023, 7:04 pm
Standard Life ‘Investigated’ Sirius Pension Fraud Without Even Collecting Any Evidence or Contacting Sirius
Filed under: Video download link | md5sum e02b55eac9a1d3690b44015080f5f9c2
So-called Pension Investigation
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The crimes of Sirius Corporation were discussed with Standard Life several times this week; Standard Life workers are evasive and they’re belittling the matter as they try to wash their hands of us despite partial culpability (legitimising the fraud, not protecting their reputation)
THE VIDEO above is a tad long, so processing took a long time and since then we’ve found out that the “French court approves Macron’s unpopular plan to raise pension age”; the English-speaking media in France calls it a “deeply unpopular pensions overhaul,” taking note of “three months of strikes and mass protests.” Of course due to the publicity/media sophistry, Macron will be mentioned in relation to other things. A lot of the media will go on and on about Macron and Taiwan, not his ongoing attacks on millions of people in his own country.
Regardless of what happened in France some hours ago, the video above explains our own ordeals at Sirius ‘Open Source’, a company which basically robbed its own staff under the guise of “pension” (which never existed). To make matters far worse, a very large pension provider (one of the largest in the UK) is trying to cover things up. I confronted them about contradictory messages, including some from managers. Well, they see something that says “2016″ and now they are denying it. Surely they see something there, but they don’t wish to talk about it. If one is patient enough to watch the entire video, one can see them trying to manufacture pretexts to avoid talking about it (stuff about politeness or manners).
The short story is, they’re protecting themselves and the perpetrators that paid them (to help scam a lot of technical people). In the process they’re trying to shield colleagues from hard and perfectly suitable questions — queries that come from the victims. They assume they can write some words on “digital” “papers” and then pretend that everything will be OK. If ‘interrogated’ a bit in real time (no chance to run away), they’re unprepared and that helps reveal the gory details. They belittle the severity of the matter and pretend it is the fault of the victims (falling prey, even if many technical and well-educated people were preyed upon). Victim-blaming is tasteless and cruel. Sometimes they even pretend to be the victim (yes, Standard Life!) because poor wee them need to hear from people who were defrauded.
As before, or as usual, workers there are casually making excuses about the person not being at “the desk” (until suddenly the person is) or “in a meeting” (but actually, not really…. they still speak in the background). They use Microsoft Teams and they make some contradictory statements about availability of colleagues.
In the middle of the video notice how he admits that I was repeatedly given false information by a Standard Life manager called Leah Brown. She kept saying “my hands are tied” when asked about a scheme that she said ended in 2016 (now we’re being told 2012, so that’s a contradiction). If for 4 years the company had not even a single scheme with any pension provider, how come it kept taking money for “pension” for 4 years without getting caught?
Upon further questioning, Standard Life basically admitted that the level of “investigation” (another manager, Laura, had promised us this) was super-shallow. They were just running some names through a database and then claimed “name not found” (does that take almost 40 days to do?) and it was likely done by only one person at Standard Life. So their allocation of resources for fraud investigation are rather revealing; they barely mind.
If in almost 40 days all that Standard Life can do is run some names or National Insurance numbers through a simple database and then check a range of dates for some company, then Standard Life is making itself look silly, to put it politely.
If this took almost 40 days, what does that say about productivity levels or the level of service at Standard Life?
Towards the end I asked the guy to speak to another person. I asked to escalate this to his boss (he is not a manager), but he declined and impolitely hung up the phone. Just minutes before that I scrutinised him for having not even contacted the company, Sirius. Well, any proper investigation speaks to the accused/defendant in order to gather facts, but Standard Life wanted to just issue a digital letter with almost no new information. Standard Life just showed portions of its database, namely dates. Standard Life never asked any of us for actual evidence such as letters or payslips. They had almost no material to actually work with. They let time pass… and pass… and pass. In the meantime, about one month ago, the company’s CEO ran away from the scene of the crime and tampered with evidence by deleting his whole past with this company. This way it’s a lot harder to prosecute the company or its leadership. The other manager is already a fugitive hiding in another country.
To be clear, this whole thing isn’t about my gullibility; many got scammed for over 10 years and those are technical people. In fact it took 3 months to finally get answers because of the stonewalling and stalling by Standard Life. Even today it was very difficult to actually progress the call; the guy probably pretended to be busy because he didn’t want to speak to me (but could not properly walk away or hope I’d simply go away).
I asked him politely, how are you going to prevent this from happening again? Their protocols are clearly ripe for this kind of abuse, so they’re facilitating this scam by “lending” the brand.
In summary, this is more like an embarrassing hand-washing exercise by Standard Life, going up to a very high level at the firm. I spoke to several managers there. As it turned out (during the call), they’re reading Techrights closely.
