Here's my little Wirecard story: Back in the day when Camarades.com/ww.com was doing well we were through an intermediary approached by a German investor, one Paul Bauer-Schlichtegroll (I'll never forget that name), an - at that moment - successful German businessman, who was importing Vans sports shoes into Europe.<p>He became a 5% investor in our company through an entity called Max Madhouse GMBH with an option to buy a much larger share. The day after the deal was signed he turned around and tried to screw us - the founders - out of our own company through a minority shareholder lawsuit.<p>Eventually we got rid of him, but this cost us a lot of time, money and momentum. Two years later Bauer was one of the founding members of what eventually became Wirecard.<p>So I've always seen Wirecard as a bunch of crooks.<p>At the same time I have some sympathy for the BaFin people, there are way too few of them and the opposition was very well versed in showing one face whilst actually being something completely different, the length to which these characters would go to show a good face was beyond anything that I would have normally imagined. I'm still a touch paranoid because of it, and I'm sure the same goes for the rest of the former Camarades.com/ww.com team.<p>I don't know what happened to him, he seems to have disappeared as well, but I do know that anything that he's ever touched was rotten at some level.
As the person responsible for IT I was audited in several companies by several of the large auditing firms. The people auditing IT had no clue what they were doing, no clue about IT and were just running a checklist. I could have told them whatever I liked.
What's the headhunter bounty for former Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek? He's still at large: <a href="https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36396/marsalek-joins-interpols-most-wanted-ranks" rel="nofollow">https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36396/marsalek-joins-in...</a>
Auditing - be it corporate accounting or election results - breeds false security the moment it doesn't work. I think transparency into critical vetting will be a big societal improvement.
This happens all the time, I worked for a company that was audited by a security firm. The security firm compromised every part of the company by pretending to be employees, third party vendors or competitors looking to hire away current employees. Some of their existing employees gave away every single detail you'd need to compromise the infrastructure during interviews.<p>Fooling auditors isn't going to be all that difficult, most auditors get confused if there is too much going on in the room . I've literally seen a publicly traded company pass an audit just by making the audit frustrating and then providing every perk you can imagine outside of the audit room (including attractive men/women). As you can imagine, they didn't do a very thorough audit.
It's behind a paywall, but according to a summary [0], Marsalek or someone from Wirecard built fake physical branches of banks on the Philippines. The auditors of EY were invited to come to these branches to talk to actors who convinced them that the 1.9 billion EUR of Wirecard exist on their bank accounts.<p>It reminds me somehow of the movie "The Sting"...<p>[0] <a href="https://www.focus.de/finanzen/boerse/wirtschaftsticker/schauspieler-in-der-videokonferenz-ex-wirecard-vorstand-marsalek-das-drehbuch-seines-fast-perfekten-bluffs_id_12340700.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.focus.de/finanzen/boerse/wirtschaftsticker/schau...</a>
I know someone who worked at a well-known Berlin Fintech and once there were people visiting from a partner bank. They expected people in various formal positions there so they filled them in ad-hoc with the available people.<p>I guess audit means most of the time just: checking some boxes without actually following through paper trails.
I can’t read German so I don’t know the details the story is detailing if any but isn’t this just the ultimate example of “fake it till you make it”, combined with an Uber-esque disdain for laws and regulations?<p>Why are people always so surprised when “disruptive” organisations actually end up doing a bunch of weird shit?