"Then came June 2020, when, in the midst of an audit, Wirecard could not locate €1.9 billion in assets it claimed were being held somewhere in the world"

EY audited them for years without asking about the missing billions.

You can't make this up. EY screwed up, but they could not have reasonably assumed that someone sets up a fake bank branch.

https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1441886/ex-dotr-exec-others-fa...

“The NBI said Arellano, an employee at the BPI branch in Malate, Manila, had admitted to receiving P10 million for issuing bogus bank certification documents that Tolentino and his law office needed as the supposed local trustee of Wirecard.”

I guess it goes to show that if you are dealing with enough cash to bribe third world governments then all kinds of new fraud schemes become possible.

We shouldn't discount the connections a GRU agent would have in 3rd world govs, they know who is corrupt enough (or able to be coerced) to do their bidding. Fake banks accounts is pretty old stuff in the spying world. It's not just money.

As the responsible manager for IT (usually CTO - internal SOX was a different matter) I have been "asked" by EY (and KPMG) about IT setups and security several times for audits. And I could have told them whatever I like, the people were right out of university with no clue about the matter and in no position to ask the right questions except reading their checklist; I always had the impression they only knew half the words they were reading.

Do you have any programming skills? ... No? Then no. Then they started blabbing about what the data could be and it basically came down on them not understanding what random is and they then just checked it off and went on. Since then I do not believe any audit which come from those paper farms.

When someone asks a question like this, they're not literally asking you to show them it.

They just want an expert to confirm it they could show it, so they can check off their box for due diligence.

Congratulations. You were the expert.

"Can you show it's actually encrypted?"

Yes, we ensure that the data is only available via TLS foo.bar with encryption algorithm baz, which is on the approved list. We have monitoring and logging that ensure that we receive an alert if the port the app is on is not encrypted, and if you'd like we can dump the traffic to show you that there is no clear text available.

Further, only users on the approved admin list can make a change or deploy to production, or login to the server as root. Moreover, we do a background check on employment for all users who have admin access, and all deployments and code changes require at least one other employee to approve them, and we log who they were, and what the change was.

“Kinder prüfen meine Gesellschaft”

children check my company

„Kommen, prüfen, meckern, gehen“

come, check, complain, go

KPMG seems to have quite a reputation.

Though that reading is a bit weird, it's practical enough to tickle the funny.

But them knowing what they are checking, is maybe a reasonable ask?

Well, what is the purpose of an auditor then in this context? Genuine question. Not my world.

I know code auditors - and they have to know about programming and the domain to provide any meaningful audit.

[Not the person you replied to.]

Did the person you replied to work for LinkedIn? What's the context for this question?

A billion dollars can buy a lot of grift.

But I guess bean counters aren't the demographic for heist or confidence movies so maybe the Hollywood ending didn't occur to them.

People litteraly went to the banks in Asia during the extraordinary audit, something that is not usually done during "normal" audits.

And yes, I also hate when I misplace my billions. Especially since I have yet to relocate them...

I think you're joking, but I'm not sure. I work in trading, and I've been on the receiving end of that phone call. As I recall, it was around 9PM in the US, my work phone rang and could see from the caller ID that it was from our London office. There were no greetings, first words I hear were "We're missing over a billion dollars. You need to find it...NOW."

When I received that call, it was in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis. The daily PnL swings were wild, and it wasn't always clear on the cause. FX volatility was insane. We did all of our PNL reporting in USD, but held a lot of foreign assets.

There was no malfeasance; I'd just taken ownership of the system a week or two before, and a nightly job had silently failed. Perl job on Windows, extracting data from a 3rd party trading system that wasn't built w/ integrations in mind, feeding it into in-house systems. It was a very flimsy house of cards. A gentle breeze in the night would knock it over. Rewrote the integration in Python, hooked everything up into our monitored job scheduler. Had to do some janky UI automations in Python until we got the vendor to add a proper CLI-based reporting mechanisms. It was a "fun" ride, but I eventually got my evenings back. Did cause the end of a relationship, though, so there's that.

I can only imagine so the slight shock you had after that phone call so! I love those stories from the trenches so you hear on HN, thanks for sharing!

Seeing as I was hearing about Libor all day, every day (almost all of our clients had their mortgages computed on that piece of info), I had expected it to be something “automatic” (like at least an XML thingie) and well documented. Instead I had to parse some html on a page somewhere (I remember some yellow background) and hope that the HTML structure around that Libor figure would remain unchanged.

This was all happening around 2007 - early 2008, suffice is to say that when all the Libor scandal happened a little later on I was not at all surprised.

It's just survey data, and no verification of whether a loan can happen at that rate? And you throw away the lowest rates, which should be the market-clearing rate all-the-things-being-equal if lenders are fungible? And if lenders aren't fungible, then isn't it all apples and oranges?

It was a club used by the big boys from banks to screw everyone else. With a madeup number that benefitted them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal

The LIBOR rate-setting mechanism was a reasonable design for the world of 1986 [1], when finance was a smaller club and trust among bankers was higher. Also, it wasn't clear back then that the volume of contracts referencing LIBOR would grow to become many trillions of dollars just a short couple decades later.

When problems finally became very clear, we replaced it.

[1] One criticism often levied at LIBOR is why it sufficed to take a windsorized bank poll instead of looking at something more reliable, such as market transactions. But that's ahistoric: in 1986, banks didn't always do unsecured 3m lending on a daily basis. And later on, banks mostly stopped doing unsecured lending to one another entirely. So critics who suggest that LIBOR should've looked at market transactions entirely miss that finance, actually practiced, is a constantly moving target and it's hard to predict the future when designing benchmarks. SOFR, LIBOR's replacement, looks at secured interbank lending — a practice that was rare when LIBOR was created.

There are strict rules and guidelines around verifying an asset. The auditor isn't supposed to "believe the documents" - they need to form an independent opinion.^1

If the auditor is unable to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence to verify the asset, they can issue a qualified opinion due to a scope limitation.

^1 https://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/member/discover/cpd-article...

What EY did was ignoring all the warning signs they had: money laundering, making up business, fraud and all that.

EY also wanted the proof the standards it seemingly met, that was the failure. But then those audits are not really meant to find organized fraud at a company to begin with.

It objectively wasn't. I've never heard of a case where the auditor doesn't independently verify the bank account balance with the bank itself. More reliable evidence reduces the need for additional corroborating evidence. In general the evidence obtained from the company itself wouldn't be considered reliable by itself.

https://www.ft.com/content/db9fa3d7-11da-476e-beea-d5ed0ad13...

This wasn't some hard to uncover marvel of accounting fraud using complex financial engineering.

If memory serves well so, it is quite a while I read Dan McCrum's book, Wirecard produced documents from the Asian banks (fake ones, as we now know). Of course, and I couldn't agree more, they should have at least called the banks up. Especially since a German fin-tech start-up, with on-going bad press, claims to hold billions with some Asian banks from business activities directly related to said accussations circulating in the press. EY deserves all the flak it got.

That being said, again, if a company wants to defraud its auditors, they can for surprisingly long periods if they try hard enough.

I think, we basically agree.

https://www.ft.com/content/bcadbdcb-5cd7-487e-afdd-1e926831e...

Didn't they setup a whole fake bank branch? Sufficiently motivated actors can circumvent any preventative measures.

Occurrences of 'litterally' your comments:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Occurrences of 'litteraly' in your comments:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Usually, I comment on mobile. And if I realized one thing, my orthography takes a very serious hit when typing on a phone, compared to a proper keyboard or handwriting.

I wonder sometimes how much of it is in the training sets for various LLMs by now.

I really hate it when I leave my billions somewhere in the world and can't remember where.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/secretary-who-ha...

You left the best part out: "...but could not trace the money and decided he was mistaken."

JFC!

Imagine being so unfathomably wealthy you don't even know how much cash you should have control over from one day to the next. Actually don't, it's bad for your brain.

It's all just relative.

I've mislaid thousands. That's years of income in many countries.

You don't need to be that wealthy before a days wages for you is a months wages for someone poor in many countries.

Indecently wealthy is relative: people look at their own incomes and often compare upwards but rarely seem to compare downwards.

A throwback to the ancient world to the Middle Ages, hiding spies among the clergy!

They are also openly supporting invasion of Ukraine as a kind of "holy war".

The russian word for "non-government organization" is "foreign agent".

This has led to some interesting quirks historically. For example, in Japan, the local Orthodox Church is the offshoot of the Russian one, and at the time of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, it had a Russian archbishop heading it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_of_Japan. Upon hearing of the declaration of war, the Japanese clerics under him asked him what they are supposed to do. He told them to pray for the Emperor of Japan and the victory of his hosts, since, as Orthodox, it was their duty to pray for their country's ruler and army during a war. He himself, being a Russian subject, could not do so, but also could not openly pray for the victory of Russia in the war while remaining in his position as the head of the Church of Japan; and he believed that it would be inappropriate for him to abscond from that duty and to flee to Russia. So he gave his bishops the blessing to pray according to the canon, and excused himself from public services for the duration of the war.

It was a western lie that Putin wants to invade Ukraine up to the second it happened, and then it became obviously the only possible choice overnight.

The most important thing to understand about Russians is that they were trained for centuries to be passive cynical conformists. It mostly worked. There are some actual nationalists who want the war. But most Russians view them as madmen who are "sticking out" and will suffer for it eventually. It's as stupid to be openly unpatriotic as it is to be too patriotic. See girkin.

Most Russians just subconsciously detect the safest position and orient themselves accordingly. Not because of conscious fear, simply by default. If Navalny became Russian president - the next day 80% of Russians would be completely persuaded they were always against the war. Orthodox church doesn't have much influence, IMHO, it's just aligned like everything else.

I'm not sure Navalny is against the occupation on Crimea and Ukraine, there's nuance there, he has said he's against the Russian Military interventions, but he is still a Russian nationalist and has (to my knowledge) been against the conduct of the war and wants a diplomatic solution but it's not clear to me that he would have ever "given" Crimea back.

We'll never know, but I "feel" like that would have damaged him politically had he been in power in Russia and therefore doubt he would have. But again, we'll never know. And it's purely theoretical, even if he wasn't dead, there is no scenario that I can realistically think where Putin would have allowed Navalny to replace him, absent the FSB/oligarchs assassinating Putin. But even there, I suspect Navalny would still have been murdered and we'd still just get "Putin-lite"

I have lots of respect to the guy, but realistically the only scenario where he would become Russian president would be if the vote for the Russian presidency was conducted in the West. He would win a landslide victory. In Russia though, if you go outside Moscow and St.Petersburg, it's not that people are against him — they simply never heard of him.

In the USSR in the 80s there was a lot of talk of one Angela Davis. She was presented as "the only opposition leader" or something. There's no doubt that if the election for POTUS was conducted in the USSR, she'd win over Reagan by a huge margin. In the USA though not many people knew who she was. So Navalny is the Angela Davis in reverse — the media across the border makes him look like punching in the weight category he does not really belong to.

Regarding Russian political landscape, you can look in any corner, from Gorbachev to Solzhenytsin and anything in between. There are not many points that these people could all agree on. But not a single Russian politician was comfortable with the thought of Ukraine joining NATO. And this includes Navalny too.

Every time Russia lost a war they had a temporary liberalization. Usually orchestrated by the government because there's no civil society in Russia.

As for what Russians thought about Nawalny - doesn't matter, never did. Nobody knew who Putin was, yet fsb made him a president no sweat.

And don't get me started about NATO. Russians will almost all immediately flip from "Ukraine in NATO is an existential threat" to "nobody cares" the moment the narration in tv switches.

The russian trick of presenting their dictators as the reasonable forces keeping the even worse tendencies of Russian people contained is obvious bullshit. In reality Russians will just go along with almost anything.

This seems similar to how the people in Germany reacted after the Nazis lost WW2.

Most Americans do exactly the same. Look at the reaction to 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The vast majority of Americans couldn't identify either of those countries on a map let alone understand their history and culture yet it was "safe" to go along with it lest you be called unpatriotic.

I don't think it's the same at all. Attitudes towards the Iraq war changed massively during the presidency of George W Bush [1]. They didn't suddenly flip when Obama came into office.

Also, looking at America today from the outside, what I see is a very polarised country with very entrenched opinions that I don't see changing much regardless of who wins the next election.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/2008/03/19/public-attitudes-towa...

Sure it changed once they saw the (wholly predictable) actual reality of the war. But the fact that a solid majority supported the debacle at the outset, despite Bush's lies at the time being roughly on par with Putin's lies about Ukraine today (in terms of being transparently BS) -- does tend to support the point the above commenter is making.

And are basically talking about something else.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/29/us/the-2004-campaign-the-...

Is not even comparable.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/republicans-pessimistic... I mean christ, look at that graph. Republican opinion changed overnight. There are even more examples for this exact effect. Seems when republican voters say "economy", they might mean something else.

People constantly paint America with a single brush. What you see on CNN, MSNBC, FOX etc isn't America. We get shit on constantly for doing that to other countries so it's always annoying when others do exactly that to us.

Funny was how they try to present them as modest, but cannot properly remove their Rolex out of a picture (or bother not wearing a Rolex).

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17622820

Hard to imagine, how anyone can believe such people in a spiritual way.

Let me try. We're you ever on an amateur IT conference? Comicon? Some sports event? Would it ever occur to you to assume some government is secretly behind it? When the Jehova witnesses or scientologists knock on your door - which government is financing them to do it and why? After all people don't do things for free.

A Doctors Without Borders medic is an agent of a foreign organization, therefore a foreign agent.

Therefore CIA and DWB are essentially the same thing. Bonus points if you can find one case where a DWB volunteer also had ties to the CIA, which would totally expose the two orgs as being exactly the same in all ways at all times.

For some reason people just can’t resist reductionism.

Being a bit reductive there, eh?

:)

"That's not what people meant". No, people are pointing out holes in your reductionism.

NGOs in Russia ALL have to register as foreign agents. Including the ones who organize comicons etc.

This is the reason I told you you don't actually understand.

As for your video I don't have that much time for propaganda, care to summarize it?

These bombings were blamed on Chechens- who hotly denied it. It has long been suspected- but not really proven- that the FSB was behind it, as a true False Flag operation to gin up support for invading Chechnya, done under the orders of former KGB/FSB agent Vladimir Putin who just happened to be the one to benefit most from the attacks. You can see the wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombing... to see more details on exactly what the evidence for this is, and the people who argue that there is just not enough evidence one way or another to assign responsibility.

So, no, Russia was not "overtly copy the US model" if anything they were innovating it first and the US was copying.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident ] Gulf of Tonkin?

The tail wagging the dog is as old as, well, government. Probably older. Nothing new under the sun, etc. etc.

Unfortunately, there is typically a big revolving door between them and any tax institution. Why toil for decades in underpaid public roles, when you can step into the gilded world of consultancy and double or treble your salary? It's like the yacht scene in The Wolf of Wall Street, except in real life most civil servants take the corrupting deal (and I can't even blame them).

Most audits are just “does the documentation support the reporting”.

I feel like this is pointing out something like, “More criminals drive Ford trucks than any other truck” which is true, but just because more people drive that brand than any other?

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1138/

Partners in the small set of auditors/accountants that can deal with big companies will kindly send the command to overlook certain important documents if they are paid enough.

The stories about the threats against the journalist Dan McCrum who was investigating Wirecard between 2014 and 2020 are mental.

I've just checked and McCrum has shared this link as well on Twitter so I count that as a reason to trust it.

I ahve to say, I am impressed a little bit. Just puzzled about the whole goal of this operation. And bit worried the Wirecard management standing trial right now, can use this to get away with the fraud they actively engaged in.

If something, it seems that Petlinsky is a German agent in Russia. I'm not even sure if the article denies it, too much of a wall of text.

"British prosecutors say that from 2020 to 2023, Marsalek ran a ring of five U.K. based Bulgarians who are alleged to have spied for Russia, directing them to gather information on people with the aim of helping the Kremlin abduct them. Officials say Marsalek was used by Russian intelligence services as a middleman to put distance between them and the spy network as it targeted individuals across Europe."

...

"While running Wirecard, Marsalek helped the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, and the SVR, its main overseas spying organization, pay intelligence officers and informants and funnel money into conflict zones in the Middle East and Africa, according to the officials.

At the same time, these Western officials suspect Marsalek was gathering information on other customers of Munich-based Wirecard, most notably Germany’s main BND intelligence agency and the Federal Criminal Office, the country’s equivalent of the FBI, and handing it over to Moscow."

...

"Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, as well as the country’s equivalent of the FBI, the BKA, told parliament during a public inquiry that ran from September 2020 to June 2021 that they had used Wirecard credit cards and bank accounts for their agents abroad as well as for paying informants at home and abroad. Senior German intelligence officials confirmed this to The Wall Street Journal. "

...

"Marsalek ordered Wirecard Bank employees to breach data-protection and other rules to compile data about clients, according to testimony by former executives to German prosecutors. Several intelligence officials said it could have provided information about intelligence agents’ work. Wirecard’s former chief product officer, Susane Steidl, said Marsalek had overruled objections to collecting customer data and told her in 2019 he needed the data for the BND—something the agency categorically denies."

https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/79/

Even the events around the current conflict seem not to have shaken the society, from what I witness. The Green parties wishes on the topic of heat pumps or people coming to their country whose skin color is not white have more revolutionary potential than Russians right around the corner or people blowing up their gas pipelines.

They are too busy with themselves and stuff like that is just embarrassing. It only serves as filling material for your everyday complaining orgy every single morning at work. Stuff a healthy German citizen leaves behind them at Feierabend.

... which are the most efficient way to wean us off of Russian gas. The Greens have pushed for years now to get rid of fossil fuel dependencies, turns out they did have a point all those decades.

Nuclear has been replaced many years ago by renewables in Germany. Stop spreading Michael Shillenbergers propaganda.

Germany doesn't need nuclear the same way they don't need Russian gas anymore. You should all cheer for the Greens and for their foresight towards the end of the 90s when they pushed for renewables. Germany would still be struggling without them and Putin's gas if it hadn't been for their push for renewables.

It had it replaced years ago with clean renewables you don't have to greenwash first in the same EU committees because your own taxpayer money can't come up with the subsidies required to keep it up, as Nuclear-France did.

And of course USSR had Eastern Germany for 40+ years - enough to develop deep networks and poison the minds.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21836620/

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal

When Dan McCrum was under threat of arrest in Germany, that was because Paul Murphy, Dan's editor, did in fact give away to some of his contacts the fact that they were coming out with a negative story on Wirecard and the time it would be published. Murphy has form for trading his own scoops with stock traders for favours. The Wirecard recording of one of Murphy's mates talking about shorting Wirecard to take advantage of the story is accurate and had Murphy (but I very much doubt McCrum) bang to rights.

McCrum's explanation for this is that Murphy's associates knew the exact time of the story being released because they had happened to guess it by sheer luck. Clearly if that's what Murphy told him he should have been a little more skeptical.

Ultimately the FT's internal investigation into Paul Murphy's behaviour and BaFin's into McCrum's work were abandoned for the same reason: the Wirecard revelations were legit, and much more serious than Murphy's breaches of journalistic ethics.

Just shows how persistent lies and propaganda can be.

The other (baseless) accusations you're talking about (and that led BaFin to investigate the FT) are extensively covered in the book.

Edit: Not sure it was insider trading, or illegal. Just probably not in line with FT standards.

But if the trade came up as a matter of an investigator researching a company, and communicating with people about the details. Even if they disclosed the exact time they planned on publishing this information, is it insider trading?

Wouldn't you have to been privy to information from inside the company itself? Otherwise anybody could have investigated this person, and had equal opportunity to discover negative things to expose?

On the other hand, there may be ethical (but not legal) issues from the perspective of the publisher.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/how-the-bigges...

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15407486/

... also Kim Dotcom who I met personally before going on a run to Asia. He too had cardboard cutouts of himself as a cartoon character all over his Munich office of DataProtect. Funny that Kim Schmitz managed to settle in NZ and not Russia. He is an outlier, probably lacked the RU connection back then.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9319468-kingpin

Especially liked the part where he is asked "so why do you keep your piles of cash in Pelican cases"? "Because they float."

> Marsalek's grandfather, [Hans Maršálek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Mar%C5%A1%C3%A1lek), was a member of the Austrian resistance and later a suspected spy for the Soviet Union.

And following the link to Hans Maršálek's page:

> He was long suspected of being a Soviet asset. Recently uncovered documents indicate that are grounds to believe he was responsible for helping the Soviets kidnap at least four people and illegally render them to Moscow for torture and interrogation.

While I am not surprised that a socialist persecuted under the Nazis would join Soviet efforts, this is some useful backstory in understanding why Marsalek the younger apparently had no reserves in collaborating with the KGB.

[0]: https://www.bafin.de/SharedDocs/Veroeffentlichungen/DE/Massn...

TR got its own full-bank license a few months ago [1], it makes sense for them to consolidate stuff in-house instead of paying third parties for their services. That is useful as a startup with a few thousand customers, as the requirements of actually building a bank tech stack are quite massive, but TR has >4M customers now and makes a profit [2].

[1] https://www.capital.de/geld-versicherungen/trade-republic-er...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.de/gruenderszene/fintech/neobrok...

And as a russian who came to states as a refugee it also boils my blood to see how much my former homeland is stirring the pots and slinging sh*t around the world and how many people can be bought. It is all going to end in a huge explosion 1917 style and a disaster for so many.

Also compared to the US, Germany has given about 60 billion total aid (including the EU share + refugee cost) if I calculate it correctly, while the US has given 75 billion. So it gives much more per GDP.

https://twitter.com/Jay_Bibo_Mario/status/172166701009283103...

I don't know if that assignment has been confirmed by any other source, but we do know that the visits have happened. They are even documented in radio archives. According to present day public broadcasting journalists, those actually happen to be the oldest known public recordings of Scholz.

This is an idea you hear quite often, but seems very unlikely to be actually true. Internet's truly big businesses are the truly big businesses of the big tech companies

And they browse porn at work more than you think.

Story time:

Stupid youngster me is tasked with getting the "tape out" of one of our microprocessors designs to Taiwan. I dutifully calculate that at the current rate of upload, it's going to take almost a week in spite of the fact that we have a solid OC-3 that should make short work of it. That's not going to fly. So ... off to IT I go...

"Hi, Mr. IT, I've got a bandwidth problem getting this tapeout to Taiwan. Can you bump my traffic in priority so I can get this out?"

Tap ... tap ... tap.

"Sigh. Yes, Mr. Exuberant Youngster, we can solve this. Give it an hour."

"Thanks." I troop back up to my desk.

5 minutes later a global email appears from Mr. IT ...

"Hi, folks. We're starting a system audit sweep of all the computers for inappropriate access. Yes, you know what that means, all those videos that you shouldn't be watching at work ... yeah, stop that, post haste. We should be done 48 hours from now. Thanks."

A quite remarkable amount of clicking in the cubicle farm suddenly begins. And, of course, my bandwidth suddenly jumps through the roof.

I ... am ... agog.

I walk back up to Mr. IT: "Erm ... thanks. But, what just ... happened? And ... why?"

Mr. IT, with a huge grin replies:

"No problem. You needed bandwidth; so I got you bandwidth. As for why? Well, I can go through the work of prioritizing your traffic which requires that I log into the external gateway, set up rules, get them correct, let you upload, remember the reset the rules and not hose the entire company while doing so. Or I can get all dipshits watching porn at work to stop for a day or two by announcing a system audit. Which do you think is easier and less error prone for me?"

Youngster me got an important lesson that day that there are often multiple solutions to the same problem.

- HSBC was fined about $2.5b all in all by US govt in 2010’s (one of largest ever) for laundering $900m for cartels over multiple years. The Sinaloa branch (not NYC, Zurich, Greenwich, London… but Sinaloa) was their highest performing branch for a long stretch

- Why exactly would a German unicorn payment processors’ COO be a longterm agent… GRU’s infiltration of German finance and energy industry for laundering and energy markets access is an open secret.

that is a breach on a Hanssen level

Putin is not in that place because he's somehow an extremely talented (or extremely lucky) person. Putin is there because that's what most of the Russian elite wants. Once he's gone, the Russian elite will put there somebody else who will fit them the most. It would not be reasonable to expect any drastic difference given the unchanging circumstances.

The thought that Putin is holding a whole country hostage to his freakish ideas is a very depressing one, but when you think of it it's actually an optimistic one because it implies that a positive change could be coming. But in my view, the reality is even more depressing. And in my view, the reality is that he has both the elites' support and the popular support.

A good proxy for the Russian situation would be China. They have changed the guy a couple of times in the last 30 years but the policy stayed mostly the same. The only things that can bring a change are either a coup (not likely in Russia) or a black horse like Gorbachev.

Right now majority of Russians still think they are a temporarily embarrassed great empire. And the goal is to return to the past glory. And the way to do it is by force, because only might is right.

The fraud at Wirecard started before Marsalek seems to have been recruited as a Russian asset; the GRU probably didn’t even know it was happening until fairly late in the game. As frauds tend to do, it snowballed, until you’re setting up a Potemkin bank branch in the Philippines to get your auditor off your back about the couple billion Euros in cash you claim to have.

Still, I can think of a few reasons why an intelligence service might want to be connected to the wealthy COO of a company that processes payments for porn websites and offshore casinos…

"British prosecutors say that from 2020 to 2023, Marsalek ran a ring of five U.K. based Bulgarians who are alleged to have spied for Russia, directing them to gather information on people with the aim of helping the Kremlin abduct them. Officials say Marsalek was used by Russian intelligence services as a middleman to put distance between them and the spy network as it targeted individuals across Europe."

...

"While running Wirecard, Marsalek helped the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, and the SVR, its main overseas spying organization, pay intelligence officers and informants and funnel money into conflict zones in the Middle East and Africa, according to the officials.

At the same time, these Western officials suspect Marsalek was gathering information on other customers of Munich-based Wirecard, most notably Germany’s main BND intelligence agency and the Federal Criminal Office, the country’s equivalent of the FBI, and handing it over to Moscow."

...

"Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, as well as the country’s equivalent of the FBI, the BKA, told parliament during a public inquiry that ran from September 2020 to June 2021 that they had used Wirecard credit cards and bank accounts for their agents abroad as well as for paying informants at home and abroad. Senior German intelligence officials confirmed this to The Wall Street Journal. "

...

"Marsalek ordered Wirecard Bank employees to breach data-protection and other rules to compile data about clients, according to testimony by former executives to German prosecutors. Several intelligence officials said it could have provided information about intelligence agents’ work. Wirecard’s former chief product officer, Susane Steidl, said Marsalek had overruled objections to collecting customer data and told her in 2019 he needed the data for the BND—something the agency categorically denies."

One can only wonder what SBU was doing in the meantime...

Right now there is still NASDAQ traded "Freedom Holding Corp" (FRHC) originated from Kazahstan with primary business of fueling sanctioned Russian money and doing other shady business in ex-USSR. Everyone knows they mass open accounts for Russia residents remotely and no one cares.

It's not like there are no other banks doing the same, but none of them are owned by US-based entity traded on NASDAQ. SEC certainly wont care until it implode on thousands of retail investors. Going after crypto is far more important.

And there are more financial institutions that have banking licenses around the globe (including US, EU and UK) with primary source of income from money laundering and again no one cares until they grow too big or scam all their customers and investors.

I'm a Russian guy (with a Freedom bank KZ account), who publicly condemn the barbaric invasion and thus is threatened by the homeland's so called authorities. A guy who left Russia after the war has started in order to stop at least paying taxes that fuel this war (and to avoid being sent to the frontline as well). Who have been living, working and paying taxes in the EU since then. I want the war to stop ASAP from the very first day. As well as having the responsible maniacs to face the trial.

And I see many of the sanctions counter-productive.

Can you imagine what it took to get my savings (before calling it "blood money", keep in mind, that I always supported the opposition, never worked for the government-affilated entities and tried my best to prevent this war) to the European banks with all this witch-hunt and passport-based discrimination.

Would you really prefer my money to stay in Russia and work for the benefit of the war?

The good news is, you're now living in a free society. You're paying taxes, you're probably following the law, too. You'll be fine here. Also, the Ruble will fall, it is just a question of when. Plus, you won't have to participate in a war economy making the useless war crap, or being cannon fodder. You made a brave, life changing decision, and part of that is saying farewell to your past.

Also, I don't know if it is possible for Russian people to use cryptocurrency but what I'd consider is go to China and buy some cryptocurrency there, then exfiltrate that to EU. Or something like that, I don't know. You'd be taxed either way (or have it not declared ...). The problem with stuff like this is, it can be used for good and bad. As such, you're collateral damage.

Why they are still being allowed to operate and have not been shutdown is a mystery to me.

I guess this needs a coordinated effort of complaints and letters to SEC, FED, congresspeople.

SEC is going after everything related to crypto, but gives no damns about some bs money laundering operation being traded on NASDAQ. This is exactly what Wirecard was in EU, but on smaller scale.

Shutting down would undoubtedly help, on the other side, understanding systems and beneficiaries needs to be handled in a different manner.

UPD: In any case my point is not talking about this situation specifically, but just pointing out US has it's own Wirecard and likely are there far more than one example. This is just one I know.

I'm not SEC to know that.

> Is it really just that no one cares?

There was some investigation by Hindenburg Research, but since it's mostly OSINT with bunch of forum screenshots and public records it did not gain that much publicity:

https://hindenburgresearch.com/freedom/

PS: Just to be clear my source of information is not some journalist aricle or Hindenburg Research. I just opened said bank account for myself along with many many other people who never in their life been to Kazakhstan.

Except even last month they been opening bank accounts for anyone and everyone left and right including providing means for very-very-shady registration of Kazakhstan Tax-ID (SSN) remotely.

And until a week ago you could literally send money from a bank cards of some Russian sanctioned banks to them and it just worked. Now when Russia payment system provider itself been sanctioned it's no longer works, but fortunately now they'll gladly accept money transfers from their ex-subsidiary that they of course sold a year ago, etc.

Again it's very much possible that from legal standpoint everything they do is "legal". Just dont be surprised why Wirecard wasn't caught by EU authorities earlier. I pretty certain Wirecard also had great law firms working for them.

Didn't Elizabeth Holmes do that too?

Never trust people who consciously dress like Steve Jobs on days other than Halloween.

Just don't wear a black one and you're fine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39560440

Entities like PayPal and Stripe are complaining they want less EU banking regulation.

Look at most news stories these days. There's some kind of conflict, two parties don't agree on something, and they report both "sides" of the story. Because the writers don't know what really occurred, it's common that a news story will give equal weight to lies and truth (or semi-truth and semi-truth).

In the insanity of normal society, this is actually promoted as a good thing. News stations pat themselves on the back for being "fair and balanced", and use it as proof of being "unbiased".

It's the opposite of unbiased, when there's no bias there are no "sides". You can't take both sides in a conflict, each "side" being a heavily biased opinion in itself, and combine them together to create a lack of bias. That's not how it works, two conflicting partial truths don't equal a whole truth, two conflicting partial truths just create cognitive dissonance (FUD).

Now look at this news story, it's quite different from what I described above. It's proper investigative journalism where the goal is cutting through opinions and second-hand information to find the actual truth. It's a major accomplishment and something to be applauded.

In my heavily-biased opinion, it's the job of a free press to seek and report the truth, to create new stories like this one, not to report "both sides".

And to illustrate when I'm saying, look at what happens to be the #1 story on my Google News at this moment: https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/29/middleeast/gaza-food-truck-de...

CNN doesn't know exactly what happened, there's conflicting stories, and all we know for sure is that a bunch of hungry Palestinians were just killed while trying to get food. Here's what CNN found:

According to Palestine it's Israel's fault.

According to Israel it's Palestine's fault.

Yes, clear as mud. It's the perfect kind of reporting for adding to the controversy and acting like there's no clear right & wrong, or viable solutions to the conflict. It's how I would do things if I wanted to extend the war as long as possible. However, I'm biased toward peace and preservation of life, so it's quite clear to me what's causing food riots and subsequent massacres.

I'm not going to get into the politics of that, but I do wish that news orgs would report the necessary context for understanding what "so-and-so claims" really means and letting people have all the information they need so they can judge how many grains of salt are appropriate. A little bit of he-said, she-said is necessary in breaking news, but there should be a lot of caveats that go along with reporting like that.

Understanding this context, seeing all the threads, and there's really not much to untangle. If anything, this was entirely predictable. Nobody should be surprised that starvation was enough to provoke a violent conflict between Palestinians and the IDF.

I believe the news media is here to provide clarity, not add to confusion. The problem is that when things are a tangled mess, the media has a lot more to report on. Truth is cut and dry, but when there's a mystery you can just keep going on and on and on... I still remember all the news about OJ Simpson, so much to report and so few facts!

I remember that earlier in the war, when some kind of rocket struck a hospital in Gaza, Israel and Hamas also blamed each other - then President Biden said as far as his intelligence goes, it was Hamas and I think that's the consensus now? We might never know for sure, but in the immediate aftermath of the hit the options for a media outlet were basically "we don't know" or "it was definitely the side we don't like". The truthful answer until someone's done the investigation is the former, but that gets you the kind of article on CNN that you're pointing out.

I profoundly disagree. People want two other, completely different things:

1. People want to be given information to confirm their own biases and preconceived notions

2. People want to be able to not have to actually do anything or change anything because of any new information.

But it does inform me sometimes!

Cost of doing business.