After receiving a confirmation that a few employees of the Cebu operations of BPO firm Sykes have engaged in Bitcoin scams, the American tech giant Google has pulled out outsourcing business from the Philippines-based company branch.
The business process outsourcing (BPO) company Sykes confirmed earlier this month that several employees had been involved in illegal activities.
“We serve many of the world’s largest brands with the highest levels of integrity, and we take fraud allegations very seriously. In the past few months, we learned that a small number of employees violated our standards of conduct.” – noted Sykes Philippines’ statement.
The initial confirmation didn’t disclose further details regarding the illicit activities. However, the local media outlet Newsbytes.PH recently revealed BTC’s involvement in them. It reads that three Sykes employees in Cebu had stolen and converted about 60 million Philippine pesos (worth approximately $1.25 million) of Google gift cards into bitcoins.
The BPO firm denied rumors that it will lay off “hundreds of employees” due to these incidents. Instead, the company fired the three unnamed employees but didn’t specify if it will file criminal charges.
Although Sykes took the necessary actions to prevent such activities from repeating and said that it will “continue to operate with the highest standards of quality and professionalism,” one of its largest customers, namely Google, moved its business operations to another location.
The American multinational technological giant reportedly said in a statement that “we are constantly assessing our business needs and have decided to shift this business to another vendor in the Philippines.”
The Asian country is no stranger to Bitcoin-related scams. CryptoPotato reported recently that the number of impersonations, in which fraudsters portray as popular individuals or companies and request some form of a Bitcoin investment, has significantly grown in the country.
After the latest such scam when Finance Secretary Carlos G Dominguez saw his name involved in promoting a suspicious auto-trading platform called ‘Bitcoin Revolution,’ he decided to seek assistance from the US Department of Justice.
Dominguez and other famous victims of similar scams sent a notice to “request the assistance of the DOJ Cybercrime Office to track, identify, and prosecute those responsible for the posts.”
The article was first published on August 24, 2020.