Beware of fake Job Listings originating from “AbacusAgencies.com”

Recently we’ve been made aware of an ongoing scam impersonating our employees and using Abacus’ name, logo and imagery to entice prospective job seekers into providing personally identifiable information.

These listings are posted using the real names and photos of our employees, pulled from public information, but originate from AbacusAgencies.com emails, or via LinkedIn and Telegram messages.

Abacus Agency currently does not have any openings at this time, and we urge any prospective job seekers to alert us immediately if you are contacted via Direct Message or Email about a potential job opportunity. 

Abacus never conducts any interviews via text message, direct message or email, and we urge you to contact us if you see these listings online. 

Most importantly, at no time will Abacus ask you to deposit a cheque or transfer money as part of any new job hiring process.

How does it work?

The FBI released a statement in April 2021, warning of cybercriminals using fake job listings to target applicants’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII). In the COVID-19 era, over 16,000 people were reported to the FBI as scammed through fake job listings with losses totaling more than $59 million. 

Technology makes these scams easier and more lucrative than ever for fraudsters, often operating outside North America or Europe. They promise you a job, but what they really want is your money and personal information. 

Criminals first spoof a legitimate company’s website by creating a domain name similar in appearance to a legitimate company. 

Then they post fake job openings on popular job boards that direct applicants to the spoofed sites. Applicants then apply on the spoofed company websites or directly on the job boards. Applicants are contacted by email to conduct an interview using a teleconference application. According to victims, cyber criminals impersonated personnel from different departments, including recruiters, talent acquisition, human resources, and department managers.

The actual employees at these companies have no idea that their name and image are being used to defraud potential job seekers. 

Telegram or Zoom is then used to set up fake interviews to entrap potential victims.

How to Protect Yourself

• Conduct a web search of the hiring company using the company name only. Results that return multiple websites for the same company (abccompany.com and abccompanyllc.com) may indicate fraudulent job listings.
• Legitimate companies will ask for PII and bank account information for payroll purposes AFTER hiring employees. This information is safer to give in-person. If in-person contact is not possible, a video call with the potential employer can confirm identity, especially if the company has a directory against which to compare employee photos.
• Never send money to someone you meet online, especially by wire transfer.
• Never provide credit card information to an employer.
• Never provide bank account information to employers without verifying their identity.
• Do not accept any job offers that ask you to use your own bank account to transfer their money. A legitimate company will not ask you to do this.
• Never share your Social Security number or other PII that can be used to access your accounts with someone who does not need to know this information.
• Before entering PII online, make sure the website is secure by looking at the address bar. The address should begin with “https://”, not “http://”.
  • However: criminals can also use “https://” to give victims a false sense of security. A decision to proceed should not be based solely upon the use of “https://”.

If you are a victim of an employment scam, we recommend taking the following actions:

• Report the activity to the Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov (USA) or the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre / CAFC (Canada)
• Report the activity to the website in which the job posting was listed.
• Report the activity to the company the cyber criminals impersonated.
• Contact your financial institution immediately upon discovering any fraudulent or suspicious activity and direct them to stop or reverse the transactions.
• Ask your financial institution to contact the corresponding financial institution where the fraudulent or suspicious transfer was sent.

TORONTO, ON (DATE) –  Abacus Growth Agency ran an insightful social media campaign for one of Canada’s leading pizza restaurants with over 700 locations, Pizza Pizza. With the intention of giving friends and families everything they needed to enjoy a game night in, the core of the campaign was based around a partnership between Pizza Pizza and Mattel Canada, which provided customers across Canada with an exclusive meal deal in celebration of the iconic card game UNO®’s 50th anniversary.

This was the largest multi-channel campaign that Abacus had ever created for Pizza Pizza, and one of their most lucrative to date with a 17x Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). Featuring remarkable work from the creative team, the campaign ads were tailored to TV and social channels including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok. For the first time ever, the team embraced the different trends on TikTok to test them against each other, thus expanding the campaign’s reach and driving top results.

Abacus’ creative team worked to create attention-grabbing visuals that embraced the unexpected pairing of the two iconic brands, with simple yet effective storytelling. The creatives were able to draw on the prominent colour schemes of both brands, while successfully delivering the campaign’s key messaging that was focused on at-home entertainment. “Our team wanted to convey more than just the deal being offered,” said Adam Mohammed, Creative Director of Abacus. “It was the combination of powerful copywriting and stand-out visuals that allowed us to smoothly unite both Pizza Pizza and UNO® for this campaign.”

The team’s outstanding work resulted in more than 11 million impressions for the campaign and delivered a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) significantly lower than the industry average.
“For over 50 years, Pizza Pizza has believed that hot, fresh food and family experiences go hand in hand. This incredible collaboration with Mattel Canada was a natural fit for us, and we’re very pleased with how Abacus helped to bring it to life, including tailoring the creative by media platform,” said Amber Winters, Marketing Director of Pizza Pizza Ltd.

For more information about Pizza Pizza, please visit https://www.pizzapizza.ca.

About Abacus Growth Agency Inc.

Abacus is a leading full-service digital company assisting businesses with digital transformation. By balancing brand building and performance marketing, Abacus has helped numerous clients as either consultants or digital AOR. Rogers Sports & Media, Lindt, Campbell’s, Pizza Pizza, and Cameo have all scaled effectively in a digital world through Abacus’ future-focused lens. www.abacus.agency

About Pizza Pizza Limited

For more than 50 years, Pizza Pizza Limited has been guided by a vision of “Always the best food, made especially for you”, with a focus on quality ingredients, customer service, continuous innovation and community involvement. With more than 700 locations across Canada, the company is Canada’s pizza pioneer and a quick-service restaurant leader, operating two banners – Pizza Pizza and Pizza 73 – that deliver quality food choices, diverse menus and exciting promotions for all tastes, lifestyles and budgets. Visit www.pizzapizza.ca and www.pizza73.com for more information.

If you would like more information about this topic, please get in touch.

Abacus Growth Agency improved its creative offering for the last four years. After winning Platinum and Gold at the 2020 Hermes Creative Awards for a digital brand launch campaign for the cannabis brand Blissed, the agency saw an opportunity to enter again to maintain creative momentum.

Hermes Creative Awards honour creators of traditional and emerging media, which suited Abacus’ vision of providing clients with digital creative work that delivers results and builds brands while doing so.

Platinum Hermes Creative Awards: The Recipe

The Platinum was awarded to Abacus’ brand identity design work for their masterclass series, The Recipe. The design fluidly expressed the passion for process that Abacus upholds through a world of stunning cooking imagery to parallel what digital marketing expertise each guest brings to the table. Ensuring the brand is more than its logo is what makes The Recipe a truly scalable identity and a shining example of Abacus’ brand identity methodology.

“Brand identity used to be something so finite; defined by logos and brand bibles. I think the digital space gives us the opportunity to reinterpret these fundamentals. It is still important to communicate a consistent identity, but also leave room to break rules so that we are able to adapt across all the platforms in which we operate,” says Stasio Liu, Art Director at Abacus. “Following a recipe by the book will always produce something tasty, but sometimes when you add an unexpected spice or two, you may just come up with something outstanding.”

Gold Hermes Creative Awards: Pizza Pizza

Gold was earned by a clever Snapchat ad for Pizza Pizza’s Unlimited Pizzas deal. The “Unlimited Scroll” takes advantage of the platform’s sound-on experience and mobile-first storytelling to dramatize a seemingly endless scroll of pizzas for ‘$7.99 each’. “For years, Pizza Pizza advertised on Facebook and Instagram as their digital channels of choice, but we recommended Snapchat to open up more opportunities. New audiences native to the platform meant new, playful, creative ideas just had to be explored”, explains Abacus Co-Creative Director, Adam Mohammed.

As Abacus pushes its creative capabilities it continues to look for unique award shows such as Hermes since it prides itself on being solely for the creators. With anonymous judging, no biases can be formed based on who works where and who is on the jury. There is also inclusiveness inherent in the show since Hermes welcomes work from brands of all sizes, not just Fortune 500 companies like many international creative awards shows tend to favour. No case studies are required either. The work is judged based on the creative that is seen, in the same way consumers see them.

“It’s great to see the continued emergence of mobile creative on the awards scene” says Jeff Goldenberg, Co-Founder at Abacus. “Applying the Abacus methodologies to our own content platform was a wonderful learning opportunity.”

About Abacus Growth Agency Inc.

Abacus is a leading full-service digital company assisting businesses with digital transformation. By balancing brand building and performance marketing, Abacus has helped numerous clients as either consultants or digital AOR. Rogers Sports & Media, Lindt, Campbell’s, Pizza Pizza, and Cameo have all scaled effectively in a digital world through Abacus’ future-focused lens.

The campaign draws on Color’s leading in-market position to showcase its award-winning cannabis portfolio, and demonstrates Color’s commitment to preserving terpenes. From its nitrogen-infused, terpene-labelled-packaging, and recent addition of Boveda Terpene Shield humidity control packets to all Color pouches, the teams at WeedMD and Abacus have joined forces to expand consumer’s product knowledge and brand reach. With the spotlight on the power of Color’s terpenes, or terps — naturally-occurring compounds that dictate each cannabis cultivar’s aromatic characteristics — as it aims to help consumers realize that big terps are an instrumental component of their connection to the plant.

“As an industry-leading brand recognized for delivering celebrated strains and terpene profiles, Color Cannabis is attracting an array of discerning consumers looking for products that boasts flavours and aromas reminiscent of a distinct experience,” said Nikki Thomas, Senior Marketing Manager, Color Cannabis and WeedMD. “We wanted to convey that opening a Color pouch releases a bouquet of aromas that could evoke a special cache or memory. Abacus has helped us achieve this through its brilliant visual campaign that instantly connects us to an elevated cannabis experience.”

Abacus came up with a simple way to express the unique consumption experience of buying Color Cannabis: terpene-specific environments and larger-than-life visuals of individual flavours crafted by the art department, all depicting mobile-friendly scenes that express the combination of flavours, fragrance and freshness of each strain. “Having a client that wanted to be all about one thing for a campaign was a blessing. It allowed the creative team to really build a world that was true to the product’s experience,” says Adam Mohammed, Creative Director at Abacus.

Abacus and Color Cannabis introduce consumers to cultivars Pedro’s Sweet Sativa, Ghost Train Haze, Black Sugar Rose and Mango Haze. The presence of their unique terpene profiles visually detail how they translate into aromatic and familiar flavours.In a category where brands are accustomed to going small — mostly due to regulatory constraints, Color Cannabis found a way to breakthrough by going big (on terpenes).

Big on Terps will be supported on Snapchat and Twitter.

About Abacus Growth Agency Inc.

Abacus is a leading full-service digital company assisting businesses with digital transformation. By balancing brand building and performance marketing, Abacus has helped numerous clients as either consultants or digital AOR. Rogers Sports & Media, Lindt, Campbell’s, Pizza Pizza, and Cameo have all scaled effectively in a digital world through Abacus’ future-focused lens. www.abacus.agency

About WeedMD Inc.

WeedMD Inc. is the publicly traded parent company of WeedMD RX Inc. and Starseed Medicinal Inc., licence holders producing and distributing cannabis products for both the medical and adult-use markets. The Company owns and operates a 158-acre state-of-the-art greenhouse, outdoor and processing facility located in Strathroy, ON as well as a fully-licensed 26,000 sq. ft. Aylmer, ON processing facility, specializing in cannabis extraction. With the addition of Starseed, a medical-centric operator, WeedMD has expanded its multi-channeled distribution strategy. Starseed’s industry-first, exclusive partnership with LiUNA, the largest construction union in Canada, along with employers and union groups complements WeedMD’s direct sales to medical patients. The Company maintains strategic relationships in the seniors’ market and supply agreements with Shoppers Drug Mart as well as seven provincial distribution agencies where adult-use brands Color Cannabis and Saturday Cannabis are sold. www.weedmd.com

Color Cannabis is a trademark of WeedMD Rx Inc. used under licence.
Terpene Shield is a trademark of Boveda Inc.

AbacusBI helps brands to overcome iOS privacy updates and Facebook Analytics shutdown.

TORONTO, ON (April 12, 2021) — Abacus Growth Agency Inc., a Toronto-based digital consultancy firm, is introducing a new service offering to drive more accurate performance marketing reporting through platform-agnostic, first-party data.

AbacusBI was recently developed as a result of Apple’s privacy updates, in addition to the news of Facebook Analytics being no longer available after June 30, 2021, which left marketers scrambling for solutions. “For the first time in history, brands are becoming hostage in a global battle between the world’s largest advertising platforms,” says Jeff Goldenberg, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Abacus. “Marketers are now trying to figure out how to beat the loss of key signals while still driving performance results. With AbacusBI, we’ll be able to strategize, design, implement, and track our clients’ first-party data, which will produce precise digital media allocation”.

Abacus is making AbacusBI available to a select number of new and current clients starting today, April 12th, 2021. The company will work with brand marketers to develop attribution strategies, and to determine how to scale campaigns that drive strong, verifiable ROI.

AbacusBI has the technological and analytical capabilities needed to answer important marketing questions, such as: what is the customer’s true CPA in relation to its actual LTV; how to best approach full-funnel acquisition; and which percentage of a brand’s marketing is going to waste.

Its tool shields clients from reliance on cookies, pixels, and imperfect last-touch attribution models. It captures users’ journeys from the moment users start interacting with a client’s website. It also tracks newly acquired leads and re-opt-ins (re-acquired leads who engaged with an ad, or opted in to a new lead form, or purchased from a new offer after adding the product to cart again) through the client’s email and order tracking systems.

“Many companies struggle with attribution due to the fact that they don’t start with a sound attribution strategy at first,” adds Peter Reitano, Co-Founder and CEO of Abacus. “AbacusBI is more than an attribution service; it’s a strategic plan on how to generate more first-party data, and how to use that to grow your business.”

Photo by Leon Seibert on Unsplash