Fraud investigations in the era of bankers going rogue

Summary: Based on our experiences and findings, one simply cannot rely on pension providers to take fraud seriously (we’ve been working as a group on this); all they want is the money and risk does not seem to bother them, even when there’s an actual crime associated with pension-related activities

THIS site isn’t a personal site (unlike my personal blog and personal site, schestowitz.com), but the issue seems commonplace and it impacts workers in “tech” (in my case, my former employer was an early sponsor of the Free Software Foundation).

I wanted to just post a quick update to say that 2 days ago I contacted two pension providers regarding their ongoing investigations of actual fraud. I wrote to them:

Is there any concrete progress on this yet?

This back-and-forth inquiry with your staff has gone on since January.

We’re fast approaching April and former Sirius staff does not want to be left aside as “April’s fools”.

The company is rapidly losing clients and may soon have key evidence in its shredders. Please progress this ASAP, even if there are not many of us and Sirius is not a large company.

We need action, not merely acknowledgements.

45 hours have passed and not even a reply from them!

One of the pension providers has not yet delivered what it promised it would send. The other has been mostly sitting on it for 3 weeks already. So what’s going on? Is this how Britain’s pension industry deals with fraud?

Sirius, the company, is ‘in hiding’ and it is losing customers (we kept noting escalation would follow for failure to provide a real address; it seems possible they not only squandered many people’s pensions but went even further). How long will it take for pension providers to take action? Will they wait until the company goes bankrupt? It might be too late by then. At a later stage we’ll explain why such delays can implicate the pension providers, making them partly accountable/complicit.

Sirius wasn’t always this rogue. Those pension providers too used to be more trustworthy, even putting their logos on athletes’ uniform to earn some trust (as if football is a badge of integrity). At one point Sirius had its logo on the jerseys of a young people’s football team (photo above), but that was a very long time ago. Nowadays it seems like the CEO of Sirius can barely even afford a shirt. Last time he held a company meeting he was wearing a rib shirt. No kidding.

Even if the media does not talk about this (or belittles the whole thing)…

AM sad about this, but I am not shocked.

10 minutes ago ONS released the latest mortality numbers for England and Wales. This update is a weekly occurrence (typically 10AM ish every Tuesday).

Total deaths week 11 in 2019: 10,567. Total deaths week 11 in 2022: 10,928. Total deaths week 11 in 2023: 12,133. Pandemic is over, folks. Go back your office cage and don’t wear a mask or anything. COVID-19 is both “mild” and “long” now.

spoke to my sister today (that’s her above) one last time before her wedding tomorrow. It’s hard to believe how fast people grow up. She’s now managing a team, doing programming while using Debian 11, just like me. Tomorrow she’ll be officially married to another technical person. Life passes by when you don’t pay attention. We all grow older, but some take advantage of the time they have on this planet. Some waste it away.

This is me aged 16, back in the days I was playing tennis a lot.

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ is collapsing, but that does not mean that it can dodge accountability for crimes (e.g. money that it silently stole from its staff since at least 12 years ago)

A SCREENSHOT of the PDF from Standard Life was shared here (with sensible redaction) a few days ago. Things are belatedly progressing.

This post has taken a long time to prepare as we need to separate gossip/speculation from verified facts. Standard Life also claims to be pursuing the facts (since the 7^th of March). As per their own update: “Dear Dr Schestowitz, I have attached our acknowledgement to your complaint. [...] If you’ve any questions, or problems accessing your acknowledgement, please email me at [redacted] and I’ll do all I can to help you.”

They’ve basically been looking into how on Earth the company (Sirius) was claiming to be paying into Standard Life accounts that don’t even exist!

The simplest explanation is, Sirius engaged in embezzlement. The management was contacted several times, being kindly offered the opportunity to explain what actually happened. Each and every time the response was schtum. For reasons we detailed here before, litigation seems imminent. Class action lawsuit is also likely, though the company is in hiding. Staff that actively oversaw and participated in the embezzlement is criminally liable, even if leaving the company later. They’ve been made aware of this (fraud, theft, forgery/embezzlement among the possible charges). Failing that, or in addition to that, pension providers can be sued. We’ll explain the legal grounds some other day.

What does this have to do with Techrights? Sirius is describing itself as Britain’s most respected and best established Open Source business.

If this is what the “most respected and best established” boils down to, then there’s serious trouble. Sirius is a major liability and a stain. This isn’t the company I joined more than 12 years ago. “You need to lie to keep your job” or “take one for the team” or “do something unethical/illegal to keep your salary” is the hallmark or symptom of criminal management, which needs to be prosecuted, not served (except served papers). I confronted the management many times before leaving (for over a year!) and nothing improved. They kept paying the salary, but behaviour only worsened over time, so I reached out to a friend.

Suffice to say, you need not be particularly charismatic to persuade workers whom you pay to also do bad things, acting out of fear (obedience for a payment). During a pandemic and financial crises (exacerbated by invasion of Ukraine) it gets even easier for bad people to compel workers to act unethically. This is a recipe for disaster.

Internally, as noted here back in December, I had circulated communications to try to ameliorate things amicably. But regarding my letters, however, they never wrote anything back. The attitude was to simply ignore the issues and to ignore the reporter. At one point I mused that I could joke with the boss, “so how has that secret money from Bill Gates worked out for you, eh?” Does one reckon that if the CEO goes to prison, Bill Gates will go visit him in prison? It’s closer than the facility Jeffrey Epstein was in when Gates visited him. As far as we know, the CEO is in Spokane area/WA somewhere (not too far from Seattle). He is hiding there, possibly not just from workers but also former wives.

Anyway, E-mails to the CEO are now bouncing. It’s a company that’s not functioning, lacks the staff to actually meet SLAs, and sooner or later will receive demands from clients that a refund is issued (not that the company has any money left).

There’s only one manager left in the company, apparently living with his girlfriend or someone else somewhere in the US (we cannot verify all the pertinent details). The company can implode any day now and we might hear just days later that he has been kicked out with a suitcase (he is working double-shifts at the moment, trying to slow down the collapse, which is inevitable anyhow).

The collapse of the company can devastate many people, who “have been in touch about trying to track down [...] pensions from the original Sirius pension scheme,” to quote one former colleague. “I am in the same situation and had previously given up trying to track it down.”

We still wonder how many people are impacted by this — probably a lot. It’s hard to find or track down every single person whom you worked with over a decade ago.

The Standard Life and NOW: Pensions plans/schemes are both registered with a company that has only one employee: the CEO. He moved everything else to two shells, one in the UK (Ltd.) and another in the US (Inc.). Both pension providers investigate this matter now.

Two months ago we requested written assurances from NOW: Pensions that the pensions cannot be scuttled as before. For the time being, Standard Life refuses to even tell what happened (the managers there made a guess/hunch) but it seems like no money ever reached their end. Now that the company is, in effect, ‘in hiding’ (a former CEO is rushing to delete anything that ever connected him to the company) It’ll be hard to sue, but accountability is still possible. The police may soon step in.

Video download link | md5sum 8e04ead83596e651305116cc77175bd0
Investigation Underway
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: In light of new developments and some progress in an investigation of Sirius ‘Open Source’ (for fraud!) we take stock of where things stand

IT hurts to know that a company which describes itself as Britain’s most respected “Open Source” company did this to us, but it did. Money laundering would be even worse, but we’re still looking into various allegations pertaining to privacy breaches, contract violations, and illegal contract-signing. To paraphrase the company’s own boss, “it doesn’t look good…”

We recently learned some additional disturbing things. They will be published here at a later date. The video above focuses on what was published yesterday. It’s one thing for an “Open Source” company to go out of business. To end up collapsing under a weight of abuse and even crime would hurt the image of Free software, including in the eyes of the British public sector (many of our clients were not private companies). This series won’t end any time soon.

Summary: 2 pension providers are looking into Sirius ‘Open Source’, a company that defrauded its own staff; stay tuned as there’s lots more to come. Is this good representation for “Open Source”? From a company that had many high-profile clients in the public sector?

THIS is taking a much longer time than initially estimated, but it has certainly progressed. The process is moving on. It’s typically like this when dealing with authorities. YMMV.

It is a very sad thing that regulatory agencies and even police are politicised to the point where one needs high-level (personal) connections, business links, bribes etc. in order to get things moving and for criminals to be actually held accountable, even prosecuted. Very sad. It should not be like this. In a functioning democratic society there’s no room for “yes, well, they committed a crime, but it’s not our problem and investigating this is ‘expensive’ to us…”

Anyway, the good news, in this particular case, is that not one but two pension providers are on the case. 2 pension providers that know Sirius. They wrote about and opened formal investigations (this week).

We’re pleased with this progress.

In additional to the letter above, which arrived 2 days ago (it is redacted sufficiently), I’ve also spoken to the manager of another pension provider (probably the third manager I’ve spoken to; some of them I spoke to 3 or 4 times over the telephone). Here is what he said some days ago:

NOW Pensions – Employer Issues

Hi Roy,

Thank you for your call today, apologies for the bad communication and service you have had from us regarding you concerns with your employer Sirius Corporation.

As discussed,.

– I will arrange for a letter to be sent to you and or email with assurances that your pension money is safe with Now Pensions
– I will alert the team that deals with your employer that the CEO is wanted for embezzlement and that he effectively scammed all his employers previously
– through a pension scheme with Standard Life
– they put on hold/review any financial requests from the company
– request what due diligence they do when acquiring employers to use NOW Pensions

Please feel free to add to the above list with any further assurances that you would like and call or email me.

Have a good evening

Yours sincerely

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

I had to remind him to make some progress, so I wrote: “Can I please have an update on this? I cannot stress strongly enough that this is a matter of great urgency, implicating many people, and we have already lost 2 months due to your slow response. Your delays have given time for fraudsters to adapt and curtail prosecution. We have evidence to prove this. ”

And again this week:

NOW Pensions – Employer Issues

Morning Roy,

I have raised your concerns directly with NOW Pensions (who deal with the employers) including your previous emails, and have chased them today, once I get the response, I will send onto you.

You did mention your wife’s NOW Pension too, due to data protection I would have to receive the request from her directly to investigate her record separately.

Yours sincerely

I politely responded as he should know we still expect some letters (promised to us in vain for several months; they kept lying about it):

Hi,

Hers is covered in the call with ??????????????? made almost 2 months ago and recorded by you. Her case is more or less the same as mine.

Kind regards,

“The plot thickens,” a friend told me, and “as I suspected, looks like your ‘pension’ money was embezzled before it even got to your pension. If that’s the case you’ll see him in court.”

I was also in touch with other victims of this fraud. We’ll be covering that in the near future.

DO not know if this is a global thing. I don’t know if that’s true only for this country or for this city. I can speak about my own area, and only my own area, for now… (based firsthand and direct experience)

When banks started to collapse about two weeks ago (about 4 banks so far, mostly in the US) it sort of started a ‘chain reaction’ and the ripples aren’t over yet. It’s a ‘domino effect’ and there’s latency, just like there was a large latency in 2008. It can take weeks or months to fully unfold. Governments intervene. Bailouts become bigger and bigger. It’s impossible to justify these. The public rebels. There’s revolt. What’s left of the media ‘changes side’ to appease angry readers. Journalists would rather not defend the rescue of thieves.

On the very same day it started (SVB, late Friday) we decided to ensure we have physical cash, just in case.

In 2020 when the lockdowns started the media kept mentioning that toilet paper was running out (of stock, at least in store). Such media reports initiated growing levels of unrest/panic. It’s a case of self-feeding loops and a self-fulfilling prophecy. It didn’t take long for people to hoard (inside their home) what was left, so stores everywhere had no toilet paper left or only very expensive brands (that fewer people were willing or capable of buying).

It seems safe to assume that right about now the maintream media would cooperate with the state to prevent runs on the banks or runs on ATMs (“cash machines” here). It’s not easy to even withdraw large amounts from one’s account in the high street branches (many branches have also shut down and repeatedly pressure people to use “apps”, i.e. do all the work for themselves). They added barriers.

Yesterday, for the first time ever, we received marketing spam/mail in the post (‘snail mail’) from a company asking if we wish to sell our home with their help. That’s rather strange if not a rude thing to be asking. One day earlier I stumbled upon an article stating that home sales have generally plunged (or people wishing to sell cannot find a buyer… not for the desired price anyway).

So one can generally see where the economy is heading…

A week ago I read that in Russia, more so after the war, many Russians hoarded physical cash. They could not trust the banking system, so they probably just wished to diversify their holdings as a failsafe mechanism (not putting all eggs in one basket). With sanctions and all, who can blame them?

I assume the media here won’t report the ATM situation, but this is a personal blog. I’ve long assumed that changing all the banknotes and coins (several years ago at relatively short notice) was about invalidating old ones to reduce the money in circulation, making it harder for people to pay with cash or even find cash (ATMs are not so easy to find anymore and those that exist are barely or poorly maintained/attended).

So here is my experience.

With the collapse of SVB I started taking money out every day or every other day. I always took it out from the ATM nearest to me. This was OK for just over a week. Then, at the start of this week, the machine ran out of 10 pound notes, so it could only dispense ’20s’ (twenties, 20 pounds). It wasn’t going to last so long and it seemed improbable they would restock it. Today, or maybe a bit earlier, the machine was already “temporarily out of order” (which means it ran out of cash; it only deals with tens and twenties). As a result I went to other machines near to me. I found 3 more of them, but 2 of them had already run out of 10 pound notes. It won’t be long until they run out of notes and basically become “out of order”. Then, the fourth machine would bear the brunt of those other 3 machines (nearest to us) not dispensing cash to people desperate to obtain some. It too would run out of cash. And fast. Maybe by tomorrow all those 4 machines (nearest to us) would have no cash left in them. Is there a plan to replenish? Maybe the government does not even want to.

And the financial crisis isn’t even over yet. It’s still young. Business transactions have been slow lately, there are many layoffs (today it’s Microsoft again), and small businesses struggle to raise funds. Some won’t be able to process payroll and issue salaries this month. They will go out of business. Nobody will come to work.

The media is trying to pacify people and one must be “ahead of the game” to react early enough; by the time the issues become widely recognised it’s already “too late” to respond to them.