Scammers offered candidates offers allegedly from Sigma Software Group: victims lost thousands of dollars

In June, fake recruiters introduced themselves as employees of Sigma Software Solutions, allegedly located in Toronto, and offered candidates jobs. Fraudsters used the names and photos of real employees of the Swedish-Ukrainian company Sigma Software Group. It turned out that this situation did not happen for the first time. DOU found out the details.

The main thing is what happened? In June, Sigma Software Group published an official announcement on its social networks that the team's identification data was illegally used by fraudsters to offer jobs to candidates across Canada.Fake recruiters posing as employees of Sigma Software Solutions, a Toronto - based company, allegedly searched for candidates for front-end and back-end developer positions and published their job offers on Indeed. Data from which Sigma Software Group representatives were used? The scammers used the names of real employees of Sigma Software Group — Hannah Abdel Hamid (Head of Sigma software Canada) and Maxim Pochebut (Chief Learning Officer at Sigma Software Group). How did you deceive people? Scammers interviewed candidates over the phone and then sent emails with job offers. People were asked to provide official documents, such as diplomas, identity cards, and so on."After that, candidates were asked to contact a colleague through a fake Telegram account to get help setting up an office. Candidates received fake checks worth up to 3 3 thousand for the purchase of office equipment. Unfortunately, some people still bought fake equipment and thus lost their money," says Alexandra Govorukha, Head of international PR Sigma Software Group, in a comment to DOU. How many people were injured? At least four candidates were affected by the actions of fraudsters. The attackers have not yet been found and it is also unknown how many people worked on this scheme, notes Alexandra Govorukha. Have similar cases occurred on the territory of Ukraine? At least one such situation occurred two years ago. It was the same company (or the people who covered it up) — Sigma software Solutions from Canada."When we created our profile on Glassdoor, we came across their vacancies, which were actually our vacancies. Perhaps scammers, using similar names of companies, thus misled potential candidates," Govorukha suggests. Details

As of today, Hannah Abdel Hamid, head of Sigma Software Group's Canadian office, has responded directly to all those affected and clarified the situation. She immediately filed a police report and also sent complaints to Indeed and Telegram. The victims with whom Hanna was in contact also filed relevant complaints, Alexandra Govorukha said.

Sigma Software Group says it will do everything possible to avoid similar situations in the future. The official statement has already been published. In addition, Sigma told The Canadian media about this story.

"It is also worth noting that our company would never ask candidates to buy any office equipment," says Alexandra Govorukha.

The company emphasizes that it cannot influence who writes to whom and what on the internet. However, all potential candidates are advised to check recruiters ' profiles very carefully and use only official communication channels (in the case of Sigma Software Group, This is exclusively Microsoft Teams and/or e — mail).