A woman lost all her savings and can't afford to return home after she was "scammed" by people posing as a global company.
Bhumi Pahilajani was looking for work after finishing her degree in English Language and Literature at the University of Liverpool. She signed up to a platform that allows freelancers to be put in contact with companies that are hiring.
Bhumi, who lives in Kensington, was contacted by an account appearing to be offering her work at Toptal - a global company that offers remote work in a number of fields. She made arrangements with those who contacted her and believed she had started working for Toptal on January 4, when she was offered a contract to work on a project worth around £1,000.
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Bhumi spoke to the ECHO, believing she had been scammed by Toptal. However, when the ECHO contacted the company, it explained it had never had any contact with her and she had likely been the victim of a popular scam which sees others posing as Toptal to steal money.
While she thought she was working for Toptal, Bhumi, 23, was asked to pay deposits into an account, which she was told would allow her to be paid for her work. Screenshots seen by the ECHO show communication on encrypted instant messaging platform Telegram with two different accounts, discussing Bhumi's work with her and asking her to place hundreds of pounds of deposits into an account in order to verify her as an employee so she could be paid eventually.
This came to a head when she was told she had accrued around £2,800 in wages but was told that only accounts with balances of £4,000 or more would be paid. Bhumi was asked to pay the difference, so she did and expected to be paid her wages in return.
However, she was then told more funds had to be sent to cover transactional fees. At this point, Bhumi could not afford to send any more.
It was only when a friend told her she had likely been the victim of a scam and that an employer would never ask for money from you, that she stopped sending money and appealed online for help.
All in all, Bhumi lost £2,444 in deposits and payments to the scammers, believing she was due to be paid £2,800 in wages. As a result, she has depleted her savings and can no longer afford to visit family at home in India.
Bhumi told the ECHO: "When I was looking for work, a person texted me about the company Toptal that needs freelance copywriters. They gave me a link and I followed that link and it led to Telegram.
"All the communication was through Telegram and that was with 'employees from Toptal'. One gave me a project.
"There were 25 pages that I was supposed to write and they would pay me £40 per page. Then he asked me to create an account on Skrill - a payment platform for sending and receiving money and cryptocurrency.
"He asked me to create an account because all the payments would be going to that. Then he sent me a contract. In the contract, it said something about a deposit, but it said this would be refunded once your project is completed."
Bhumi added: "They sent me a contact and I signed it and made the deposit. Once my project was collected so now I was waiting for my first payment. He gave me another person to speak to on Telegram.
"For a few hours, they told me to wait. Then another person started asking me for other deposits to cover international transactions. Then asked me for hundreds. Then suddenly their finance department goes into auditing but they would not tell me about this.
"Then I received an email which said it was only processing payments above £4,000. Mine was around £2,800 along with the previous deposits. So, they said I could either wait for three months or top up my account to £4,000, so then they would pay it out.
"I couldn’t wait for three months because my plan was to go back home to India and visit my family. So I paid them £1,200 again to top up my account to £4,000 but this never came back.
"They kept on asking for more. I said my bank balance was basically gone, I couldn’t pay them more, so they told me to sign up to MoneyGram. At that point I stopped, I couldn’t pay anymore."
The result has left Bhumi unable to travel back from India. Once she found out she was the victim of a scammer, Bhumi told the ECHO she didn't know what to do next to get her money back.
She said: "I’m devastated, it’s taken all my savings. I’ve saved this money over the past two years so I wanted to save it for further education - I want to do a Master’s, I want to do a PHD. I wanted to go back home and see my family.
"I’m furious, I still receive messages from them and other people saying they're from Toptal. I’m not paying them any more."
A Toptal spokesperson told the ECHO: "We are aware of instances where scammers have impersonated official Toptal representatives in a way that is similar to what you describe. In some instances, scammers have gone as far as using photos of people on our website and our trademarked brand imagery. We diligently work to address such issues when they come to attention.
"Toptal operates a formal application process for those interested in joining our freelance talent network. Freelancers do not pay anything to Toptal to join or once they are part of our network. The details of Ms. Pahliajani's experience are in no way representative of our talent acquisition process or the overall experience of talent within our network.
"Toptal did not contact Ms Pahliajani. Additionally, our records do not show any communications from Ms Pahliajani asking us to confirm the legitimacy of the requests she received from the scammer. When an individual is concerned about outreach from someone purporting to represent Toptal, we encourage them to email support@toptal.com. We have also published an informational notice to help people identify and report scams, which you can read here.
"This is a very popular scam and we’ve addressed this with information notice. This has been on our website for several months due to the increase in volume of scams with people attempting to leverage the Toptal brand for these types of scams."
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