• The news about the deal of Paris-based hedge fund named Hedonova investing $16 million in an Estonian leading platform for bringing economic benefits to sustainable farmers Carbonomy during a Series A round was spread on the Internet. As it turns out, the fund, as well as the startup, misrepresent their selves online.
• In particular, allegedly Estonian startup Carbonomy used eAgronom’s digital identity to present itself as an affiliate. eAgronom is indeed a Tartu-based sustainable farming company, that is not, in fact, in any way associated with Carbonomy.

• The website of so-called Carbonomy was also completely ripped off of eAgronom, using its name on the Terms and Conditions page. At the moment of this publication, this website went blank, but the domain name can still be found.
• As Mauro Battellini noticed on Twitter, the identity of the French investor Hedonova appeared to be unreliable, too. In the story with Carbonomy, the firm was presented as a Paris-based hedge fund. In other instances, Hedonova is mentioned as a California-based global fund, with the CEO named Alexander Cavendish. But neither Hedonova’s website nor its social media mention Carbonomy. Although, the fund fairly recently announced the funding with the same amount, but in a completely different project.
• Moreover, the Hedonova fund had wide coverage in online media, including a sponsored post in Forbes India, where allegedly Alexander Cavendish “raised $400M from the likes of Microsoft and the family of Oman.”

• According to several reviews, that Mauro shared in his Twitter post, there seemed to be uncertainty connected to Hedonova. The investment community published some articles that the investor didn’t pass the standard KYC (Know Your Customer) check. In particular, Alts.co warned that the Hedonova had a founder misrepresenting himself online, among the other red flags.

The whole fake story coverage seems to have started from the Hedgeweek European Awards 2023 winner announcement. The award was indeed a real event, where Hedonova Advisors were awarded as Best Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund.

• How did the company discover suspicious activity on its LinkedIn account and other job platforms? First, there was a job opening on LinkedIn with a different description than on its official website. LinkedIn marked it as “imported from an external resource.” It looked suspicious, but the team couldn’t find out the origin of this vacancy. So it was deleted.
• Sometime later, the recruiter Olena Starushko discovered many fake accounts created in the company’s name on a Ukrainian job website. But she couldn’t remove them:

“On that day, as usual, I had opened the company profile to check if there were new job openings and requests. But then I was shocked to see a ton of unknown vacancies — all on a high level and specified for Polish candidates. Moreover, all of them were created from an account with my name. The worst was that I couldn’t edit them. There was my name, but the account wasn’t mine,” she explained.

Examples of the fake job ads:

• Olena reached the S-PRO Chief of Recruiting, and the fake jobs were deleted then. Scammers seemed to find security vulnerabilities in mentioned job platforms. They used Olena’s personal data from LinkedIn and her corporate email and registered an account with a close domain: @s-pro.us (instead of the real @s-pro.io).
• At that time, the fraudsters not only published vacancies (with attractive terms for foreign candidates) but had already started negotiating with “potential employees” to scam them for money or personal data:

“Their goal was to make an excellent job offer and then ask to buy specific expensive equipment by specific sellers, namely their accomplices (for example, purchase a computer that the candidate would never receive) or pay for visa processing since all jobs were designed for foreigners. They also can require your banking details in order to pay you a salary,” the company reps resumed.

• Even after the company deleted all the fake jobs, Olena Starushko continued to receive messages from developers interested in these positions. Moreover, the candidates were surprised that they could not write to the recruiter in the previous chat.
• The company’s team discovered that they weren’t the only ones who encountered such a scam: for example, fraudsters have scammed candidates out of thousands of dollars by hiding behind the Sigma Software name. The company Avenga has posted a guide about such fraudulent schemes and the signs that should alert a candidate when applying for a job.

Fake job recruiters presented themselves as employees of the Toronto-based company Sigma Software Solutions. Covering up by using Sigma Software Group’s real employees, Hanna Abdel Hamid, Head of Sigma Software Canada, and Maxim Pochebut, Chief Learning Officer, they approached candidates for positions such as front-end & back-end developers, interviewed them and sent official job offers via email.

After the candidates submitted their official documents, they were asked to contact Hanna through a fake Telegram account, where they received fake checks for up to $3,000 to purchase office equipment through a fake vendor.

At least four candidates became the victims of these scammers, Oleksandrs Govorukha, Head of International PR Sigma Software Group, said. They bought the fake equipment, the checks bounced, and they lost their money.

We understand that this situation affected many talented and innocent people. We want to let you know that the authorities were already notified. Our company agrees to cooperate with the official investigation to provide all necessary information that could reveal the truth, find the scammers and restore justice,

Sigma Software Group comments.

The company emphasizes that it interviews candidates via Microsoft Teams or Zoom and never over the phone or Telegram.

About Sigma Software Group

Sigma Software has offices in Ukraine, Poland, Sweden, the USA, Canada, and Australia. It develops solutions for its customers in the telecommunications, aviation, advertising, gaming, banking, real estate, and healthcare industries. The company works with startups, product companies, and the enterprise segment.

Since 2006, it has been operating as part of the Sigma Group, the largest group of companies in Scandinavia offering various IT-engineering services.

There were two ways to get accepted.

First – rigging entrance exams. A student asked for exam deferral under a false pretense, then he/she would choose one of the sham schools in Texas and California to pass the exam. In that school, a teacher who received a bribe provided the student with the right answers or took the exam instead of the student. Parents had to pay somewhere between $15K to $75K for such a service.

Second – cooperation with college coaches. After getting quite a large bribe – we’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here – coaches would take a child based on the latter’s ‘outstanding athletic achievements’, even if they were bogus.

The masterminds

The leader of this crime ring was William Singer. He is the director of Edge College & Career Network engaged in facilitating college admissions. He received the funds for his services via the charity Key Worldwide Foundation. He worked with several associates who handled financial transactions and liaison with parents.

Among his alleged accomplices is Igor Dvorskiy of Ukrainian descent. He was the teacher who was paid (usually a $10K bribe) to help students with the right answers. He worked at California’s West Hollywood school, which was one of the schools Singer referred future students to take exams to. The name Dvorskiy is in the DOJ’s documents indicating his place of work. According to Voice of America, they are allegedly talking about a person of Ukrainian descent whose mother also worked in the field of education. Mr. Dvorskiy himself did not reply to the questions of reporters.

The list also includes representatives of other schools that facilitated the fabrication of ‘athletic achievements.’ The complete list is available in the article of The New York Times.

Public exposure

The scandal received an unprecedented coverage in the U.S. as nothing of similar proportion has ever been exposed. In addition, Singer also gave out the names of those who paid for getting their children into a college, and the list contains quite a few celebrities. Moreover, some of the world’s most prestigious educational institutions, such as Yale University and Stanford University, have also been implicated in the scandal. According to The New York Times, many children did not even know that their parents paid for their admission because teachers, who received bribes, were submitting their exam papers with the right answers for them. In light of that, the authorities will not bring any charges against the children and colleges will decide whether to keep or expel them. In contrast, their parents are facing 12 to 37 months in jail. Singer is facing up to 20 years in jail.

Previously we wrote about how a Ukrainian EduBirdie found itself at the center of scandal in the UK: it advertised its essay ratings on YouTube. We also wrote about the workings of essay writing industry in Ukraine and why it is illicit.