Money Men: A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth

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There were plenty of details brought up that didn't really seem to ever be followed through, or even brought to some resolution of the type "the trail went nowhere", while other, frankly uninteresting discoveries get pages-worth of attention. What was not clear at the time — not at all — was that this choice, made for perfectly good reasons, was what seemed like a step down would actually become a path that led me to a pinnacle of success and great fortune. Another sage lesson is that penalties for breaches, even when in the tens of millions, were insufficient to deter behaviour. At a time when social media is increasingly causing facts to be regarded as beside the point, it is a reminder that the truth is always worth chasing. The story could have only been topped if McCrum discovered verifiable evidence (as it surely exists) of the local dart-throwers scrawling their mark on the legal documents for a coupla’ spins of the fruit machine.

In all likelihood the surveillance of McCrum and his boss by hacking groups and private investigators is the largest private surveillance operation ever. She put down her spatula – she was always stirring something – turned from the stove and looked at me. Two years later Wirecard acquired its own bank by purchasing XCOM, allowing it to issue its own credit cards. I also really liked to learn more about the colourful characters who are living their lives as professional short sellers. Unlike Pav Gill, some of the whistleblowers in McCrum’s story chose to use pseudonyms and remain anonymous for fear of their safety .Their hall of mirrors was constructed by generating revenue through mis-labeling transaction categories to process otherwise illegal payments; faking income then using the “profit” to acquire failing companies for multiples above market value (and bribing former owners into complicity); and cowering dissenters through aggressive PR counter-messaging, legal action, and phishing attacks from cyber security contractors. From there, he documents the unexceptional origins of Wirecard in Germany and the company’s ensuing rapid global growth (including a Dublin office).

The person identified as the main man behind most of the dodgy dealings, COO Marsalek, escaped, and there are rumours that he's living under the protection of GRU in Moscow. With McCrum at the epicentre of Wirecard’s downfall in 2019-20, you would only get a more detailed, thorough account of the whole story if it were written by the disgraced CEO Markus Braun and COO Jan Marsalek themselves. Perhaps this was also a bit harder to really get invested in, as all the crimes really were so opaque to the average person who still saves money in a savings account, and to whom all these high-stakes schemes are best summed up as "rich people are the worst"; this is not the same as in the previous two titles mentioned, where the real damage is felt by oftentimes poor, desperate people- the kinds of people that would get blamed for what's happened to them and left out of a solution as well, even when the crime is known (I mean, the Sacklers still get to be a name largely associated with philanthropic endeavours, never mind the thousands whose lives were waylaid by opioid-graduating-to-fentanyl addictions, with no support or understanding at all).There was something deeply grounding and at the same time spiritual about Sabbath and the way my grandparents observed it.

Which meant they bought old rags, sorted them into grades and sold them to cloth merchants for recycling.One of the questions the Wirecard scandal leaves open is why market participants blindly rationalized what Perry long considered to be obvious evidence of wrongdoing. Indeed, McCrum tells the story through the voices of those whose decision to speak the truth frequently comes at a cost to themselves. When in 2014, Dan McCrum, a bank analyst turned investigative journalist, received a tip about “German gangsters” running a company that advertised itself as the German PayPal, he could not have imagined that his reporting would allow him to expose the biggest corporate scandal in post-war Germany. He flies to Bahrain to query the payer only to embark on a serpentine journey finally leading to a construction site where the company's lawyer refers him to a local actress who then refers him to her “business partner,” Christopher Bauer. The tale is infamous: a hot start-up, a billion-dollar fraud and a fight for the truth, as Financial Times investigative journalist Dan McCrum so succinctly puts it in the subtitle of his new book, Money Men.

It is a compelling case study of a seemingly eternal truth: when a business is built on lies, there are always clues.This book details the lengths to which people within the company Wire card went to hide evidence of fraud, and the efforts of one journalist to uncover it. Dan McCrum is a proper reporter: there is no threat, con trick or hangover that will stand in his way. Grandpa was an Orthodox Jew, and he walked a very long distance every Friday night to go to the synagogue. Again and again I pushed these feelings and thoughts away, as my attention became more focused on what the files revealed.