A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth
Money Men by Dan McCrum is an investigative journalism book that exposes how often financial fraud occurs and the power dynamics that allow it to continue, using the Wirecard scandal as a case study.
If anything, Wirecard was always a company with an outsized opinion of itself. And every “great” company has an even greater origin story. Wirecard’s humble beginnings center around three men with big ambitions and mammoth egos. And they give us a glimpse into the road ahead.
It all begins on a flight between Munich and Berlin. The year is 1997, and a 40-year-old Paul Bauer-Schlichtegroll, with his perma-tan and designer jeans, strikes up a conversation with a photographer for the American porn magazine, Hustler. And just like that, the connection is made. Bauer-Schlichtegroll is soon off to Beverly Hills to acquire the magazine’s German publishing rights.
But it doesn’t take him long to realize the real future is online porn – if there was only a way to charge for it. So, he switches gears, establishing a new company that can take direct debit payments over dial-up internet. Soon after, a competitor goes bust. He buys it for parts but keeps the name: Wirecard.
In no time, Wirecard moves into another shady internet business: online gambling. In the early 2000s, many countries were still drafting regulations for the industry, while others had already banned it. Banks preferred to avoid this gray area, refusing any payments that used the online gambling code 7995.
Not to be discouraged, Wirecard finds a way around this 4-digit problem, first by creating a third-party wallet that’s used to load funds at digital casinos. Then later, by simply swapping the 4-digit code for a different one whenever the payment is rejected.
At this point, Paul Bauer-Schlichtegroll is itching to cash out. Maybe he can see the writing on the wall. Preferring to cut corners, he avoids an expensive and scrutinizing Initial Public Offering process, or IPO, by orchestrating what’s known as a reverse takeover. Wirecard buys a defunct company for peanuts that already went through an IPO, et voilà! In 2004, Wirecard goes public, and Bauer-Schlichtegroll bows out.
Two other men become instrumental in taking this now public company into its bright future. Dr. Markus Braun is hired as CEO, a self-serious Austrian with a penchant for wearing black turtlenecks in the style of his contemporary, Steve Jobs.
The other is one of Wirecard’s earliest employees, Jan Marsalek, hired in his teens as Chief Technology Officer. Also Austrian, Marsalek is a confident go-getter who runs the IT department in the basement. The only problem is that the electronic payments system he spent years coding never worked. It was junk.
The two Austrians have to work together to find a solution and save their company.
Money Men (2022) is the astonishing story of the rise and fall of Wirecard. Once described as the PayPal of Europe, it took a small group of analysts, whistleblowers, and the tenacity of one journalist to finally bring this house of cards down.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
