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 c4ca62ca5c8ebc2a7974b42f3ff4d884
Why the Pension Story is Relevant to Us
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ will be the subject of many future posts and today we explain why this is a subject of relevance to Techrights

THE pension situation where I worked for nearly 12 years impacts a lot of people and it helps reveal rampant corruption in the pension ‘industry’. I’ve been thinking about this deeply for days, also in light of several news items about France and about the US pension promises being unsustainable. Are people meant to ever retire? Are people living to work? Or they do work to eventually live? (Hours after work or after they leave work altogether)

We have a lot more information in the pipeline, albeit we’re limited by what we can say at any one time. The reasons are explained in the video above as well.

Why did the accounting people allow pension fraud to carry on for so long? Could they not refrain from collaborating? In fact, who does the accounting anyway? There might be an even more sinister scandal therein and we’re investigating the matter.

Another question: can one actually withdraw a pension early? The state would say that’s possible, but companies lie their way or simply hide when the subject comes up (e.g. bank details specified or time for cheque to be picked up with paperwork signed). The outcome of any hypothetical investigations into this turn out to be ugly. The pensions seem like a black hole. You can put money in, or think you put money in, but you can never take anything out.

Our approach here has been multifaceted; the goals and methods are many. Since we deal with an actual criminal matter, we cannot be ignored by pension providers, police etc. They cannot simply turn a blind eye. Everyone agrees that pension providers are very sensitive about their brand/reputation (more so than banks). There are several reasons for this, but those are beyond the scope of this post.

As noted in the video above, many in the “tech” sector have a decent salary and thus pensions. Employers typically enroll staff as means of lock-in or “loyalty”. Millions of programmers and GNU/Linux engineers have been subjected to this, so it is on topic and very much relevant now that the media starts questioning the viability of pension-like systems (in the long run). Discussing the matter can compel them to double-check these things and, in general, it’ll help guard workers’ rights.

The coming week should be interesting as we investigate along several separate lines. First, the accountancy. I wrote to them this weekend:

Hi,

I am writing to you as a person who recently resigned from your client, Sirius Corporation.

You may or may not know this, but Sirius Corporation and a shell called Sirius Open Source Ltd. changed their company address to your address this past October. I confronted the company’s CEO in length over it (40-minute phonecall). He supplies a false address. The company claims to be based at your address. This CEO resigned only weeks ago.

To make matter worse, the company committed serious pension fraud, as confirmed to me and ex-colleagues on April 11. We have formal letters from Standard Life to share with you. This is now a criminal matter and a serious issue that may unfold in months to come. It represents potential reputational harm to your firm.

We expect the the person you’re dealing with might face extradition proceeding and prosecution for fraud, committed against many people for years.

I can discuss this over the telephone with you. It’s an urgent matter.

In addition, we’ll show what happens when you ask a pension provider to explain lies from many employees, including a manager. We’ll then show what happens when one asks for an “unauthorised” (but legal) withdrawal.

Finally, we can show what happens when trying to tackle criminals directly. Imagine the “big boss” pretending that he does not even exist; while he was stealing a lot of money from his staff in secret he worked out secret deals, eventually one with Bill Gates under an NDA.

To be very clear, this is not about the money; this is not about “destroying Sirius” either but about holding criminals fully accountable and doing justice for the victims, of whom there are many (Standard Life actively obstructs inquiry into how many).

The crime in this case was committed against GNU/Linux enthusiasts. It was committed by people who are not even using Linux but are recommending the Linux Foundation. Yes, that one! Remember that Linux Foundation is not for Linux. Linux is for Linux Foundation, but Linux Foundation is not for Linux but for Microsoft et al. It’s not a reciprocal relationship but an exploitative one. The same is true in Sirius. The company has oppressed and exploited people who actually use what the company uses in its marketing.

For comparison’s sake, to paraphrase a friend, there’s the Linux Foundation, which has Microsoft staff on the BoD. In Sirius, the management staff does not use Linux. Then we have the Linux Foundation, whose director doesn’t even use Linux. Or Linux Foundation, which fails to protect the kernel from hostile code. In the case of Sirius, money was taken from Bill Gates in secret. We still cannot figure out what the NDA was meant to hide and why there was a relocation to Washington. Then we have the Linux Foundation, whose bureaucrats have higher salaries than key developers. Remember that Sirius paid its technical staff like 3 or 4 times below market standards (for this kind of job and working times).

Compare this to the Linux Foundation, which has Linux-hostile board members. In Sirius, some managers just bullied the staff and oppressed people like it was a hobby

The Linux Foundation, which advertises for its most hostile competitor, seems like an apt analogy here for many reasons. The bottom line is, the company engaged in fraud (we only found out this year) and its victims are many people who actually use GNU/Linux, unlike the perpetrators of the fraud.

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.

Video download link | md5sum
Time for Sirius Management to Face Prison
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ are very serious; we’ve come to the point now where it’s more or less a countdown ahead of arrests or class action lawsuit (or both)

TODAY we published a lot of material about Sirius ‘Open Source’ and since recording the above video we’ve published a little more.

In light of what Standard Life told us last night (they sent a letter at night, which is unusual for firms that work 9 to 5), we’re now progressing the case against a company that defrauded GNU/Linux system administrators, Free software specialists, programmers and so on.

This is now a criminal matter. Several people need to be arrested.

The issue is further complicated by an NDA signed with the Gates Foundation (we don’t even know the details of it). The principal fraudster now resides in Washington, the state. To get full accountability they will likely have to issue an extradition warrant (sent from authorities in the UK to the US). This adds a number of new dimensions, including the divorce. The financial fugitive has many liabilities in the UK. Some of these issues are discussed in length in the video above.

This is what they sent me in 2011 (other Free/libre software and GNU/Linux enthusiasts were also scammed this way):

Along with 7 pages in total:

Summary: The pension fraud of Sirius ‘Open Source’ was facilitated by Standard Life; the very large pension fund, which is based in Scotland, needs to pay reparations to many victims (we cannot even tell how many; these are colleagues who are unaware of what’s going on) and the criminals need to be arrested (the fugitive in the United States needs to be extradited to face justice for his crimes)