Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ is likely to have committed very serious fraud and criminally stolen money from its workers; today we expose some of the more preliminary findings from a 3-month investigation

THIS part of the series is “long in the making”, so to speak. It took many long calls, distant contacts, meticulous correspondence and subsequent analysis to prepare. Today we present more of an overview and some time soon — likely later this week — we’ll release a lot of audio. It’s hard to tell how long this sub-series will be as that’s highly dependent on numerous leads. The short story is, Sirius isn’t denying the allegations. These allegations are very serious and the consequences profound (like several years in prison). Sirius is now existing on “borrowed time”; the CEO left very recently and the so-called ‘founder’ is in hiding. He works double shifts, trying to salvage what’s left of the company he claims to have founded (we doubt this, based on documents presented here before).

The index at the top explains how this relates to a pension provider, which we had no choice but to publicly name (and shame). I sent them about 10 E-mail messages, but I never received a reply or a phonecall as I asked (I said this was very urgent — not a lie by the way!). It seems they’re rather afraid of this case, fearing perhaps that it’s a major liability in light of various scandals (which I explained to them in very clear terms several times so far this year).

So far we’ve involved close to 10 people in three pension providers. Many people are aware of this case, including a pension provider that has some past as a client of Sirius. We decided to make complaints only after all other avenues had been exhausted and advised people to transfer pensions in order to secure them from future fraud.

In the process we did manage to get numerous letters, including formal documentation. We started chasing the pension providers, insisting that they need to cooperate (get reply or shame them, unfortunately, for basically covering up fraud). After several pension checks (not the Tracker) we could finally see disparities; where the money vanished is less of a mystery over time, as we assume that the company might as well have used pension payments in payslips to deceive staff. That’s a very serious crime. And to compare to statements, as per the formal balance, means that the discrepancies become evident.

As it turns out, others experienced the same thing. “I emailed the office a few years ago, xxxxxxx responded,” to quote one former colleague, and xxxxxxx “said xxxxxxx would try and find out but never did.”

“If you saw the other stories,” I responded, “you’ll see that a lack of response in Sirius says a great deal. That says a lot and [is] so very typical!”

When it comes to the pension lapses, I had to escalate 4 times before even receiving any response at all (a face-saving reply). This is covered in detail. The same is true for paylips that stopped coming.

“xxxxxxx is employed to cover up for xxxxxxx,” I said. “That’s xxxxxxx actual job. Lots of examples of that.”

New material will emerge while we prepare future parts of the series, but the cat is out of the bag and we’ll report any progress with the ongoing inquiry, which has been preliminarily escalated to the police. If it’s not progressing, we should open a case and report to the Pension Regulator as well. Some of them are too slow to act and we cannot wait for too long because Sirius will be bankrupt soon.

The company itself is trying to hide. The CEO of Sirius has just left, so time is at the essence. Just before he left, or one month ago, I sent the following message: “Please provide the full address to send legal papers to. Not the address of the accountant of Sirius or the address of your accountant (which you also registered your business with). Failing to provide the full, real address will result in further escalation and potentially class action lawsuit, with former employees involved and clients fully informed. I shall expect a reply by Tuesday, February 7th.”

Sometimes they pretend that the E-mails they don’t like to receive simply got “lost in the mail”, so I asked later on: “Any response? Did my message get lost in your ‘spam box’? Again? I’ll give you until end of Tuesday.”

He left the company some time later, without uttering a single word. If they are still not answering very simple E-mails, we should consider a class action lawsuit. They know they did something, so they try to keep quiet, hoping not to give away any clues.

Half a day ago I asked the last remaining chief if what the pension provider tells me is true. I wrote:

Dear xxxxxx,

I spoke to numerous managers at xxxxxx for 3 months. They reached the conclusion that myself and colleagues never had any money deposited there — money taken for “Pension” off of our salary, as per the payslips for 5+ years. This suggests pension fraud and an actual crime. I assume, moreover, that yyyyy (as Director and spouse) was fully aware of this. In the name of journalistic integrity I must first ask you if this is patently false — a chance for you to comment in your defence. A lack of reply can be interpreted as implicit admission of guilt.

To paraphrase what you said in a call back in November, “it doesn’t look good.”

This message was received but not answered; it’s not a “no comment” per se but a refusal to even comment or issue a self-defending statement. Due to the nature of the job, he certainly saw that message and chose to hide. E-mails to the address of the departing CEO are bouncing (from Google oddly enough! Is it outsourced as well?), so they’re not even routing E-mails to the former CEO. Is anyone left to run the ship?

In the above message it is noted that yyyyy was a spouse of the ‘founder’ and a Director at the time, so she knew what was going on and she, unlike her former husband, is based in the UK and isn’t a fugitive in the US. Can she too be held accountable?

The last CEO, who bullied my wife, left very recently. He probably knew nothing about this (or wasn’t complicit) because he was not inside the company at the time, but maybe he could see paperwork or was given verbal memos about this taboo subject. Maybe the inquest has, in its own right, motivated the departure (fear of being held accountable when a real address was pursued).

In the above, the main point is, they hide and they do not reply to any email that doesn’t serve their interests — a years-old issue.

In the next few parts we shall present hard evidence (audio also) of the crime. Unless managers at a very large and reputable pension provider lied to me (which is improbable; too risk for them to do this), the mini-series may become rather long (already close to 10 parts). It should be noted that so far we’ve only scratched the surface. We have a lot of recorded material to publish and we shall work with British authorities on this matter.

Video download link | md5sum ee817ed1743c77954138a53082fbdbc1
Pension Providers That Lie
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Based on my own experience and a multi-month investigation (dealing with several pensions going back 12 years), pension funds in the UK are truly awful and definitely not trustworthy; colleagues too are receiving no replies to very simple enquiries and money just goes ‘missing’ with neither notification nor explanation, probably plundered by failing companies like Sirius ‘Open Source’ (which does not obey laws and keeps hiding)

THE video above is hopefully a good enough roundup of what’s happening or has been happening at Sirius ‘Open Source’ when it comes to pensions alone. We’ve been covering the subject every month since December and the latest is a whole mini-series about “Sirius ‘Open Source’ Pensiongate”. Earlier today we finally named one of the culprits (after months of frustrating lies) and the above plays a portion from a 26-minute phonecall (0:34-1:00, 7:06-7:40, 15:40 onward, 18:10-20:10, 21:05-25:03), basically skipping personal details, waiting time, and the duration they put me on hold (for over 8 minutes). The person who picked the call said he “spoke to a colleague of mine” and insisted that it “takes more investigation” or it’s “longer to process”. But it has been 20+ days since that call and his promise of letters within 5 working days wasn’t fulfilled. To make matters worse, I’ve contacted them by E-mail several times since then and they’re not even replying.

The conclusion of the series will be, no matter where you live and irrespective of how “reputable” a firm may be, if you have a pension you need to check that it is really there; either the employer or the pension providers can run away with the money without notifying anybody. Do not take anything for granted. Many of these things are like Ponzi schemes or scams. Compare to these, “bullshit jobs” are reasonably benign.

Facilitator of Fraud? There Is Already an Official Track Record of Misconduct.

Summary: There seems to be quite a crisis in British pension funds, which casualty ‘disappear’ funds and enable companies to plunder staff and former staff; in this series we focus on two such funds, one of which employs close to 10,000 people and covers very many companies (millions of people’s pensions)

Founded relatively recently (2011), the pension provider currently used by Sirius ‘Open Source’ has quite a colourful (and surprisingly short) past. It was moaning about the state of the economy in recent years (in public filings that we saw) and it probably struggles a lot. It’s a very small company, already sold to another due to difficulties, and its service has been truly appalling.

I cautioned them that I would take this public and name them unless things improved. It started in December and we’re in March already. It’s only getting worse. “Your repeated lies to me and your stonewalling have left me without any option but taking this public,” I said to them yesterday. “Rest assured many colleagues and clients of yours are reading this. Tomorrow I shall name your company in public and release telephone recordings to show your utterly poor record as a company, including the lies. This will be only the start.”

They didn’t respond. They never respond. I did this patiently and politely for months already. The above is an escalation in tone.

So who’s behind this company? Not many people and public records show a volatile board with many resignations. It was put up for sale 5 years ago or just over a year after Sirius had moved funds into it (after Sirius apparently silently plundered all the older pensions — the subject of further verification these days, maybe even an impeding class action lawsuit).

As it turns out, NOW: Pensions is considered dodgy; according to Wikipedia (after many edits, some of which controversial): “During the three years leading up to June 30, 2017 Now:Pensions achieved a 2.8 percent annualized return, which was significantly less than the returns achieved by almost all of its competitors during the same time.[1] In November 2017 the Pensions Regulator fined the trustees of Now:Pensions £50,000 for administration problems. Followed by a fine for £20,000 in February 2018.[1][2] In February 2019 The Cardano Group acquired Now:Pensions from ATP[3] after Now:Pensions ran into multiple administration problems and years of poor performance.[1]”

So they already got fined for breaches. Only less than a year before the fines Sirius chose this company. How come? And where did the money go?

I’ve already cautioned former colleagues about this and if this is representative of the state of the “pension industry”, then we’re all in deep quicksand and generally in trouble. Based on recent articles in the media, more and more people nowadays realise they’re affected.

In the case of NOW: Pensions, maybe they realise that some of the money that they possess is linked to fraudsters and they’d rather protect the fraudsters than do what’s right. We’ll release some audio soon.

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ has chosen rather questionable pension providers that ‘cover up’ for the company’s abusive behaviour

TODAY we resume the series not because of progress but due to a lack of progress. We set some deadlines or ultimatums and those have already been missed/exceeded by over a week. The short stories, as we shall tell them in the coming days, might not be applicable to all pension providers in the UK, only at least two of them — the ones I’ve dealt with personally for months already (as did former colleagues).

Before we share some audio of conversations (likely some time tomorrow or later this week) let’s just say that this is still an ongoing investigation. At least 2 people were saying they cannot find anything about me on their system. Upon escalation, however, a “Standard Life” supervisor or line manager or whatever (Leah Brown) said the pension had been transferred (why could her colleagues not see the name?) but still refused to give all sorts of critical information. This was done without any authorisation from those impacted and, yet worse, without even notifying them that it happened.

This investigation of ours follows some pension-related abuses at Sirius, as covered here back in December (we shared some letters too). It was escalated further in light of two revelations: 1) the older pension ‘vanished’. 2) the existing one is being elusive, the provider evasive, and those who phone to ask about it are being provided with only “template” responses.

At first, I had to submit complaints to them at least twice only to finally receive a phonecall (about 3 weeks late). At a later stage they sent out an E-mail:

Dear Roy,

Thank you for contacting [redacted].

Following on from our conversation on Friday the 6^th of January 2023, I can confirm your employer has now sent us over the contributions for October and November.

I’ve arranged for a contribution history to be sent to your home address within 10 working days.

If you need any more help, we have a new alternative way for you to make your request digitally. You can securely confirm your details and send your request to our team *here.*
[redacted]

We would also appreciate if you could click on the link below and let us know how we did today.

Kind Regards,

[redacted]

[redacted] Helpdesk

I then responded:

Dear [redacted] (or colleague),

There seems to be about 5000 pounds missing. The statement was received by post, but it lacks about 5 years of my pension — money passed to you from another provider back in 2016. Please phone us, as before, to clarify why the statement omits this. I’m on [redacted]

My reference number is [redacted]

Regards,

They never responded to this. They never followed up at all.

After a long while (maybe days) I said:

Please phone me and my wife ASAP. We both have pensions with you and it is a matter [that's] urgent because:
a) there seems to be a lot of “missing” money
b) the employer may be committing fraud
c) I am a whistleblower (see (b)), so they might try to retaliate

Regards,

PS – call me today, it is very urgent.

There were several more messages like this (about 5 in total, sent days apart).

They did not reply to this either. Days later I phoned them up and they lied to me. They gave false, empty assurances. I sent the following:

Hi,

Your handling of clients is totally irresponsible and completely unacceptable. You did not reply to any of my urgent E-mails (about 5 of them), so after a week I phoned you up, at my expense, and spoke for nearly an hour with [redacted]. He later spoke to my wife as well.

We both demanded written assurances that the former employer cannot plunder the pension like it did with our previous one. You said you would send us written assurances within 10 working days. Today we finally received two letters, but those are just balance statements (like a template reply) and nothing else. It’s a repeat of what you sent us before. It’s redundant. Nothing at all was written for us. In other words, [redacted] gave us false verbal assurances and you gave us nothing at all.

Hence, I hereby demand that you send us the money of our current balance (yes, I am aware of the very high taxes). Phone us immediately. We live nearby and will come to collect our money ASAP.

You failed us repeatedly. You failed numerous times. You gave false assurances. You moreover fail to heed our warning about an employer (your client) that plunders people’s pensions. This bodes well for the pension sector as a whole.

Please phone us now to arrange collection of our funds.

At this stage we already spoke to other victims; we suspected they had paid us salaries using our own money (our pensions) without telling us. Or maybe someone paid his mortgage using our pension money. Whatever it is, many people’s money seems to have gone “missing”.

I wrote to them again:

Hi [redacted],

My wife and I still wait for the letters you promised us. If we don’t hear back in the next day or so, we’ll take this public.

That was over a week ago. They just lied over the telephone (we have that recorded as proof) and they never responded to any E-mail. It’s as if their policy became, “do not speak to the client” (if the client phones us, lie to the client).

And we just got the phone bill 4 days ago. We paid almost 20 pounds for phonecalls (to just one pension provider, not even counting the other one).

A financial firm that kept lying or made false promises would typically not survive, would it?

Among the other expenses in the phone bill:

08 Feb
13:10
[redacted]
Calls to UK landlines
00:25:06
£5.94

27 Jan
09:20
[redacted]
Calls to UK landlines
00:45:53
£10.51

27 Jan
09:19
[redacted]
Calls to UK landlines
00:01:12
£0.46

This story isn’t over and it’s still an ongoing dispute. The other pension provider is even more scandalous, but we’ll cover that separately (some former colleagues are also “on the case”).

As one former colleague put it, “I was in the [redacted] one and got the weird e-mails saying some payments were missing but when I got a statement from them they had all been fixed” (or so we’re told; there are other issues).

The bottom line is, if you work for a company that has gone rogue and is acting ‘dodgy’ (British slang), then you might want to check what pension provider it chose and what happens ‘behind the scenes’. They may be arranging the looting of staff’s salaries (or partial wage theft) under the guise of “pension”.

Wanna get your money? Over your dead body!

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ is under ongoing investigation by former staff; it seems plausible that many people’s pensions just ‘vanished’

THIS series isn’t quite over yet. It slowed down a bit because of ongoing inquires, which are slow to progress because of stonewalling and stalling tactics. To give a rough outline of what’s to come, we’re going to look into two British pension providers, which are mysteriously evasive (we’ve recorded calls too; we may need that to defend our allegations). We’ll then go back to Sirius and discuss what happened. It seems like we’re in a similar situation to that of many other British workers^* and even of workers globally (the economy isn’t in a good shape; hours ago Reuters said “U.S. household debt jumps to $16.90 trillion”).

About 2 hours ago Ryan in IRC said that he had experienced similar things in the US. He said: “You mean like that union pension that they said I’d get and now the union doesn’t exist and nobody could find the pension money? Very common in blue collar jobs that have a union.”

We heard similar stories from other Americans. It seems like every 1-1.5 decades this is being done. Many aren’t even aware that this is done until they approach pension age range.

As of December, I’m no longer working in Sirius and neither does my wife (summary of the reasons here). We decided to quote/cite a final letter. But nothing was final. The company was trying to get out of a deep hole — a gaping hole full of scandals. Sirius was hoping there would be no further digging, even when further investigations had already begun and were coordinated for better progress/effect.

Over in my personal blog I began — back in December in fact! — to look into the pension situation, only days after I had resigned [1, 2] and the following month it turned out that it was exceptionally difficult to track down the pensions. By January I had contacted 3 pension providers [1, 2, 3] and also tried the pension tracker, regulator etc. Totally useless. Earlier this month I wrote about the preliminary findings [1, 2, 3] and began making logs in text and audio (while informing upfront those whom I recorded over the telephone).

Judging by publicly-accessible documents (downloadable from Companies House), the latest pension provider cites “COVID-19″ and “war in Ukraine” as financial risks (we’ll spare the screenshots/link as at this point we don’t want to name or show the name of any pension provider). It is a company just about a decade old and that in itself is worrying; will it even be around at all decades from now?

As for Sirius, the company has in effect vanished. It went into hiding, the bosses don’t respond to E-mails asking about the company’s physical address (for legal papers regarding a potentially criminal matter). They know they could be forced to go to court or face a government investigation. Some clients of the company are fully aware of it, just like former and current staff. Many have been reading this series.

To one person I said: “I feel a strong moral obligation to bring to your attention new revelations about the company I left 2 months ago (I joined the company 12 years ago). Sirius is not what it seems to outsiders; the company is routinely breaking laws (even very basic and fundamental laws). It has apparently plundered the xxxxx pension of not only existing workers but past workers too (alumni from over a decade ago). It cannot be located. Several people contacted xxxxx and even management insists it cannot be spoken about. The company is effectively hiding and is refusing to provide the address to send legal papers to (the company charged its registered address 3 times last October… to the address of an accounting firm!). I’m not the only person who is concerned about this. Sirius uses false pretences and doesn’t even meet SLAs; sometimes the CEO covers shifts while not equipped with tools, knowledge, user account, monitoring etc. You’re paying for service ‘in absentia’. The company is running not only out of money (debt) but also staff. It operates through several shells now. It tricked staff into participating in this shell game (as explained in here, dating back to 2019 when mysterious NDAs were signed and xxxxx moved to another country after his divorce).”

“Thanks very much Roy for the information,” said the respondent. “We’ll investigate. I hope you’re well.”

This seems like a common theme (see footnote below), so we shall look deeper and deeper into it. If the pension providers continue to stonewall (we gave a final deadline/ultimatum today), we’ll resume the series as soon as this weekend. A lack of response is in itself rather revealing; repeated lies and false promises also speak volumes.
_____
^* Days ago “Which?” picked up this topic, stating: “We investigate why so [many] people lose touch with their savings, and challenge volunteers to trace their pension pots” (they didn’t stop there; in later days there was a podcast about it, saying: “We explain how you can go about rescuing those all-important savings” (notice the word, “rescuing”).

Video download link | md5sum 13ba109b0a99e32cf821626a724004c8
Dude, Where is My Pension?
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Today we commenced a multi-part mini-series about pensions and what happens when they suddenly vanish and nobody is willing to explain where all the money went

THE Sirius ‘Open Source’ scandals are so many and new ones are being unearthed.

Several dodgy things like NDAs and illegal contract-signing should have served as warning signs; companies that are operating through shells don’t typically do so for benign reasons and what about pensions of staff?

As we noted here before (along with hard evidence), the company was failing to pay into the pension schemes while at the same time not sending payslips to staff (that’s illegal by the way). So now, after leaving the company, we examine the aftermath. There are many skulls/skeletons in this closet.

The above video talks about pensions in general (with limited focus on the UK’s practices and laws) and explains in rather general terms what happened in Sirius.

Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ series continues in the form of a mini-series about pensions; it’s part of an ongoing investigation of a deep mystery that impacts people who left the company quite a long time ago and some of the lessons herein are applicable to any worker with a pension (at times of financial uncertainties)

IT has been about a week since we ended the series about my former employer and opportunistic CEO, who carried the term “Open Source” in vain (there’s a relatively short summary of the other issues). My wife resigned at the same time as me and she too has been attempting to understand what happened to the pensions.

Yes, pensions (plural).

Back in 2016 the pensions were changed and the old one seemingly evaporated. Former staff (that had left the company already) wondered what happened. These things could not be tracked down and there were obstacles impeding those desperate to find out. The Pension Tracker and Regulator were of no use, either. The government isn’t helping.

In the upcoming Sirius (pensiongate) articles we’re going to look at what happens when British workers suddenly discover that a pension simply vanished, even if the paperwork with all the references and the names is still fully intact. Even large pension providers are implicated in this, and it is unclear if they facilitate so-called ‘liberation’ schemes that let people plunder other people’s money. I wrote about this last month in my personal blog, but this series looks at it from another angle.

Generally speaking, what good are pensions when pension providers can certainly collapse or if the company offering a pension to staff collapses (and steals everyone’s money in the process)? How is that financial security? Seems more like a Ponzi scheme with a clock set to detonate everything a decade or more later. The so-called “financial industry” is not an industry and economics isn’t a science but a religion.

“Stock market pensions force us to give money to billionaires or else we don’t get pensions,” to quote someone from IRC (last night). “That’s the point.”

My best friend warned me about this over a decade ago. Are pensions any safer than bank accounts? And what will large technology companies do after economic downturns? Zoom is the latest to lay off loads of workers.

In the case of Sirius, existing and past staff aren’t fully aware of what’s happening. After about 3 hours waiting and speaking over the telephone (at great expense to myself) I think I’m ready to establish and report some uncomfortable facts. Colleagues might want to know and deserve to know what’s really happening. Some might to take what’s left in the pension, even with 55% tax, before the company once again plunders people’s pensions, as it apparently did before. I spoke to both pension providers and it’s rather revealing. They too would find it illuminating.

We already consider suing the company, which is effectively in hiding, but if it files for bankruptcy in the process, then only the lawyers will win. If we pass this on to other former staff, which is impacted and may help organise class action, it’s the same problem. The company Sirius already operates through several tiny shells in several countries. It’s most likely about evading liabilities (business and personal).

In the next part we shall take a look at some of the substance and highlight how this establishes a pattern of deceit and backstabbing.