Series parts:

1. YOU ARE HERE ? Sirius Crimes Reported to British Authorities, Formally Registered With References (Many Victims), Here’s What It Means and What Happens Next

Summary: Sirius is a good case study, especially for longtime insiders; Techrights investigates what it takes to deal with white-collar crime, starting with evidence-gathering to investigation and prosecution (maybe we’ll have some mugshots to share at the end)

PENSION fraud seems rather common in the UK. Companies like pension providers profit from it. It seems to be happening routinely. So much so that it is a special category with loads of options. How many people in the UK report pension fraud each year? Probably a lot.

The crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ go beyond pension fraud, but we’ll focus on pensions here. Sirius isn’t so unique in this regard, but there are points to note. The CEO escaped the company last month, but people below processed the payslips with fake claims of pension payments adding up. These payslips were basically lies. The company, Sirius, offered us a pension that did not exist. This was done not just to me but also to my colleagues; there are similar letters sent to them too, with accompanying payslips to demonstrate the glaring anomaly.

For over 5 years the company deducted money, for “pension” (arranged by Sirius, with alleged contributions of its own), but the money was not given to the pension provider, as formally confirmed by the pension provider itself (final response issued and challenged a week ago).

The company kept deducting for “pensions”, for another about 4 years, after it no longer even had any records with the pension provider (see letter).

The company refused to talk about this, even when inquiries came from former staff a long time ago. Now the company is in hiding, without a physical office. The company’s CEO abruptly left last month (when all this was exposed and verified by the pension provider).

There are at least 3 people who participated in this embezzlement. It must be acted upon urgently as they may be hiding money and tampering with evidence.

As we noted a day ago, there’s an upcoming series about the deception as the company may have engaged in debt/tax dodge/bankruptcy. All those pertinent shells of the company can be connected to a secret deal with Bill Gates, signed with an NDA in 2019. They basically use a legal contract to hide potentially illegal deals. NDAs are legally dubious, especially where the D refers to disparagement rather than disclosure.

I’ve had a lot of time to speak to other victims of this. “Mine is pretty much the same,” one of them said regarding the trail of documents. “So it looks like basically nothing ever got paid in to the Standard Life scheme and our contributions were never made from the start, they were just kept instead. I think the only way to get anything back would be to sue Sirius and/or wait for the police to investigate.”

The police is already investigating. “I have most of my payslips so I can prove I was making contributions,” said a former colleague, “have you already provided similar to the police?”

Well, the police will find out there are too many victims to ignore.

If you phone the police, as I have a few months ago, you quickly realise they don’t want to deal with such crime and instead ask you to report to Action Fraud. It won’t be cheap. It is based in the City of London and would likely progress very slowly as it’s not “strategic” or “high priority” to them. However, now that we have a lot more letters and many victims they cannot simply brush this aside. I’ve got more than just the payslips with me. With cooperation at Standard Life perhaps they can get a detailed list of all the victims and manage to get in touch with all of them.

So what happens next? Stay tuned for Part II.

Summary: The seriously rogue company, Sirius Open Source (it is not Open Source), has run out of time; with the doors closing and with evidence-gathering concluding, it’s time to face the music

MY earlier post hinted that this coming week, starting this weekend, we shall escalate a little, starting with a mini series about crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’. These crimes started the very year I joined (2011), based on hard, verifiable (and already-verified) evidence. In parallel, special law-enforcing authorities in the UK shall be getting involved. Such involvement is imperative. The crime was committed by more than one person and several culprits are based in the United Kingdom.

As the title suggests, as before, none of the enablers and beneficiaries would speak about this. Their consistent approach boils down to hide, keep quiet, pretend not to exist. At this stage there is no other choice but to proceed with prosecution and arrest. Litigation isn’t necessary, just as you’d not sue a thief who broke into your house; you phone the police and report the crime. We’ve already gathered the evidence for almost everything. It just took time, but it spares cops the typical excuses/stalling. The Pension Regulator isn’t a cop; hence, it doesn’t deal with crimes.

As noted several days ago, we got formal (written) letters confirming our allegations. We no longer explore draining out NOW: Pensions (bank details for withdrawal or cheque for us to pick up with paperwork signed) because after months of insistent reminders the company finally did the right thing and followed that up days later. It’s just a blunder and a scandal that it took so long and involved them lying about half a dozen times (managers also). How many people out there, outside Sirius, are similarly scammed but aren’t aware of it. Probably a lot.

Sirius management does not wish to talk about it. When the special crime units phone them all up they will be forced to talk. Those who will face or accept unpleasant consequences did it to themselves. And they did that at great expense to other, innocent, unknowing people (this was covered by several external entities, including Standard Life).

Plunder on behalf of Sirius is “Planning for tomorrow”? Using the name of Standard Life and fake/false payslips?

Summary: The facilitator of a scam was contacted the other day (Integrity Financial Management Ltd.); their staff too seems to have played a role in the pension fraud, so we’ve contacted Integrity Financial Management directly, however it chose not to respond and instead pretended not to be aware of anything — a major blunder and an actual crime against GNU/Linux administrators and programmers

INITIAL CONTACT was made the other day with Integrity Financial Management Ltd. That firm may have facilitated the crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ and it needs to know about it. We have the names of the people who managed these accounts.

You may not be aware of this, but your firm facilitated fraud at Standard Life

http://techrights.org/2023/04/17/fraud-at-sirius-open-source-with-integrity-financial-management/

Myself and former colleagues are still trying to hold accountable the culprits

http://techrights.org/wiki/Crimes_of_Sirius_Open_Source#Fraud_Investigation

Why did you issue all this material to us? Why did you facilitate theft of pension funds?

Please contact us as soon as possible to clarify the matter.

Just because they’re not replying does not mean they’re off the hook. This is a typical business strategy; they try to ignore anything that’s not convenient to them, hoping it would miraculously go away.

As we also noted earlier this week, Sirius had engaged in financial fraud and it is now registered at the address of the accountant, so that’s another potential legal liability for them.

So far I’ve spent about 10 hours on the phone all in all. And even when each time you phone you know exactly what needs to be achieved and try to get to that as fast as possible, they delay and obstruct. It’s an actual method, tiring down the complainant or bleeding people to death with phone bills (like legal bills/lawyer fees as barrier). It’s a bit like a network of organised crime made to over up its own doing. It is well coordinated to dodge accountability. Business as usual.

As an example of endless delays, consider NOW: Pensions. I contacted them back in January and it took until now (late April) to finally receive a letter of assurance that can be regarded as satisfactory.

In fact, sent just after 4PM yesterday (by E-mail):

Dear Dr Schestowitz,

NOW: Pensions Trust (“the Scheme”)

I write about your complaint. I would like to thank you for your patience while we have investigated this matter and would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.

I can confirm we sent a letter (the information in the letter applies to all members in a NOW Pension Scheme) to your home address on the 12^th of April 2023. For reference I have attached the correspondence to this email.

This has been protected with a case-sensitive password. The password is your national insurance number followed by an exclamation mark. [...]

Should you consider that this does not bring the matter to a conclusion, you can request that the Trustees review the matter through the Internal Dispute Resolution Process (IDRP).

[...]

Yours sincerely

Craig Aitken

NOW: Pensions Trust Administration Team

And here is a mildly-redacted (home address) PDF of the document. We redacted a photograph of the physical thing earlier this week. Why did it take so long to issue such a letter? With NOW: Pensions alone my wife and I must have spent about 4 hours over the telephone; it costs a fortune as they don’t have a free line and they keep you waiting on the line a lot (when they don’t leave you pressing buttons and ‘speaking’ to a bot).

Summary: Having just contacted NOW: Pensions (and several times more this past week), while moreover working on 3 leads at the same time, they finally (belatedly) gave a real assurance

Today we’ll share a bunch of photographic evidence regarding crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’, a firm that claims to be Britain’s “most respected” firm in this domain/area (‘Open Source’). Of course it’s a lie. Not just the part about “respected”…

“They kept lying to cover up prior lies, in effect lying to me like half a dozen times already.”Half a day ago I sent the following E-mail message to NOW: Pensions. About an hour ago I finally received a letter addressed to my wife and I. After nearly 3 months!!! Months of endless remainders after repeated lies.

Here is the E-mail I sent last night:

A few days ago Standard Life sent a whole bunch of us a formal letter concluding that Sirius had engaged in pension fraud and stole money from us for many years. This is a criminal matter. This is now formalised.

My wife and I are coming to collect our funds from NOW: Pensions this week. Please specify the time that best suits you. We live not far from your office.

Suffice to say, repeated lying by your staff — including by managers — will be duly noted. We trust neither you nor Sirius.

The sad thing is that pension providers have helped the perpetrators of crimes, covering up for them instead of working to protect the victims, who are the people’s whose money is actually making its way into the accounts of reckless gamblers at the pension firms. Who do you work for? Are you working for employers who commit crimes instead of employees (whose money you are taking)?

Silence on this matter won’t help you. Au contraire. Please respond today.

They kept lying to cover up prior lies, in effect lying to me like half a dozen times already. It’s circular and when challenged on the lies, more lies follow. Those people are handling (gambling with) people’s money. Trillions of dollars are managed by those sorts of firms.

As victims, we can progress along some lines. Standard Life, which we’ll tackle separately later, tried victim-blaming (we have this on record). That’s akin to saying to a rape victim that it is his/her fault, e.g. “why didn’t you sense s/he’d rape you after the date?”

Many technical people suspected something was amiss and when phoning Standard Life we were only obstructed, so in effect Standard Life allowed the fraud to carry on. Standard Life cannot simply pretend to have not benefited from this.

“Standard Life cannot simply pretend to have not benefited from this.”Forgive my tone (rants) or at least understand the cynicism after being secretly robbed for years by my employers whom I foolishly trusted, as did my colleagues (they were robbed too). The main criminal, the ringleader so to speak, now hides in some ‘basement’ (by the looks of it, a tiny apartment) somewhere not far from the Gates Foundation. Well, all the doors are closing in on him and gradually, over time, those who facilitated and collaborated, are paying the high price.

Below is the letter that literally came through the door less than an hour ago (at the time of writing).

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.

Summary: The previous crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ merit letters of assurance, which were already promised by three people at NOW: Pensions (including a manager); if no such letter can be provided, specify the reasons and explain why three people who work at NOW: Pensions made promises to two people (in vain, followed by more lies to cover up the original lies)

MANY people are speaking about pensions today. France is checking whether Macron did something unconstitutional by sentencing millions of people to two additional years of work in their 60s (not something they consented to in the past). However, the timing of this post is purely coincidental. It’s a Friday and I’ve not heard back for almost a week now from NOW: Pensions.

As a reminder, the company kept making contradictory promises (i.e. lies) or breaking promises, not honouring their own contracts, etc.

Here’s the full chain of correspondence with few redactions (names of their workers, including managers):

> Roy Schestowitz wrote on 08/04/2023 04:32:
>> Complaints now pensions support wrote on 05/04/2023 15:03:
>>> I hope this helps to settle your concerns regarding your NOW Pension
>>> fund, as you can see from the above, they have outlined how and who
>>> is responsible for protecting your pension savings and applies to all
>>> NOW Pensions members.
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Please send the full letter, as promised, to
>> 1) my wife
>> 2) myself
>>
>> as promised by ????
>> as promised by ????
>> as promised by ?????
>>
>> several times since February. We need this obligation in writing.
>
> I need an update on this. There are multiple complainants about the
> pension fraud. We need action, not stalling tactics. You behave like
> lawyers, not like a pension provider.
If you do not reply by the end of today (Friday), prepare the cheque for my wife and I to pick up next week at your office.

We are withdrawing all the money. You are a reckless, lying, untrustworthy company. You not only lied to me (3 different people, including managers) you also failed to reply to very simple E-mails about a dozen times.

Meanwhile the police and Action Fraud will be getting involved.

Well, it’s 5PM now on a Friday. They failed to respond. They saw my message. They just keep stalling and stalling. It’s the usual (for over 3 months already).

If this is the state of pensions in the UK (providers refusing to deal with open complaints and not responding to E-mails for weeks), then we need to talk about this. To make matters worse, as we shall show later today in a video, even when pension fraud occurs the pension providers care about nothing except how to avoid getting sued. Nothing else matters to them. They don’t even seem to mind the fraud so much; they profit from it by facilitating that.

Pensions were meant to actually protect the pots of money (capital), not to protect people who abuse pensions. Has the business model changed? If so, when?

In a sense, pension providers nowadays seem to be a lot like HR, i.e. they work only for employers, not for employees. They sometimes help employers plunder the oppressed employees. On that of that, they shield the employers by obstructing questions about the schemes, giving false assurances or simply ignoring/disregarding/closing complaints.

Summary: The crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’, or the company robbing me and my colleagues behind our backs, started the fraud weeks or months after the company’s accountant had suddenly left (though maybe it predates this); instead a bunch of fraudsters took over, engaging in embezzlement that wasn’t confirmed to us until this year (and only after long and persistent pursuits, as Standard Life was stalling and stonewalling for 3 months)

MY articles from December already quite extensively covered the dodgy accounting at Sirius. I’ve heard references to such conduct (“sophisticated” or “smooth” criminals), coming from people who were long involved in the company. This is a company that pretends its address is in fact the address of an accountant or accounting firm. The CEO who fled the company (scene of the crime) last month had done the same with his own company. These aren’t people of integrity, they’re immoral imposters who barely ever use Free software (they (mis)use the brand “Open Source” mostly for marketing and recruitment).

As noted here back in December, the company had been violating the law for years by not sending payslips, rarely sending them, or only sending some after a lot of nagging/reminders.

Who was doing the accounting anyway? One theory is that the company was passing the data to some external (the above-mentioned) people to sign off, without actually auditing or verifying anything. That might explain them ‘failing’ to check that for many employees the money wasn’t at all being sent to pensions as specified in over 60 payslips (per employee). Serious ‘failure’! This went on for over half a decade. This was definitely not an accident, hence the scare quotes around the word failure.

In the E-mails below (redacted for privacy) one can see the allusion to the manager explaining the accounting, rather than actual accountants doing the accounting, dealing with accounts. The messages were sent to and by a notoriously reckless, lazy employee (with almost zero technical skills) who forgot to arrange for coverage (colleagues were left alone at night!). Many such blunders happened without her facing consequences. There were good reasons for this person being strongly loathed among many staff. There’s the lying about looking for cover, the failure to actually provide cover (for holidays), among many other failures….

If that’s not bad enough, she was also bullying staff and by the looks of it (or on the face of it) participating in pension fraud, in effect robbing the people she was bullying. If she can be proven to have been culpable in the “pensiongate” (as a Personal Assistant), she might be sentenced to prison.

Anyway, shown in bold below is the part suggesting that accounting at Sirius was done improperly by people not qualified to do so (and when mistakes were made, innocent staff paid the price).

——– Forwarded Message ——–
Subject: September Salary
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2020 22:11:11 +0100
From: ????????? ?????????
To: ????????? ?????????

Hi ?????????,

I hope you are well. I have just checked the salary and it looks to me like the payroll only counts 7 shifts instead of 8 shifts for this month. Could you please check up on this when you are less busy?

Many thanks,

?????????

——– Forwarded Message ——–
Subject: Re: September Salary
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2020 17:23:51 +0100
From: ?????????? ????????
To: ?????? ??????????????????

Hi ?????????,

Thanks for getting back to me, but this is still not clear enough to me because on the months of June and July (both months) I got 8 shifts and I was paid £850.71, whereas now (for the month of September) I was paid £784.93, so there is a huge difference. If you can send me the payslip, at least I will see deductions, so that will help.

Br,

?????????

——– Forwarded Message ——–
Subject: Re: September Salary
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2020 09:35:02 +0100
From: ?????????? ?????????
To: ??????? ??????

Hi ????????,

Do you have the payslips available now? If possible, I would like to have the payslips from January 2020 up to date. They’re needed for legal reasons.

Regards,

Hi ?????????,

Just spoke with [CEO]. It seems you were over paid last month, so it was deducted from this month. I will arrange for your payslips to be sent to you on Monday.

Kind Regards,

????????? ?????????

——– Forwarded Message ——–
Subject: Re: September Salary
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2020 12:25:33 +0100
From: ?????? ????????
To: ??????? ????????

Hi ???????,

Thanks for sending the payslips. I have reconciled the things which [were] not clear to me in the first place. In my understanding, I wasn’t overpaid on the month of August it [is] just that the accountant or whoever [is] doing the payroll didn’t deduct the necessary stuff that they are supposed to do (that’s their job) [and] because of “their” mistake I was penalized; If I didn’t see the payslip I wouldn’t know it. Anyway, thank you everything now is clear.

Best,

The key part above is, the reference point isn’t accountants but the CEO. If the CEO does the accounting (he is no accountant) or overlooks all this, then it is ripe for great abuse. A potential perpetrator can never be entrusted as his/her own bookkeeper.