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.
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.
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.
So I've always seen Wirecard as a bunch of crooks.
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.
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.
I can also add some here. We worked for WD for a while. There was this weird thing going on. We requested MacBooks because we were working on Linux and cloud but the management had a policy that managers were entitled to have MacBooks while by default engineers had to use Windows laptops. As externals we were denied MacBooks.
So managers were running Powerpoints on Apple while engineers were running Python, aws-cli on Windows. Perfectly reasonable according to them. I could only estimate the amount of productivity lost on this. Of course WSL was not allowed because corporate security classified it insecure.
Management getting swaggy laptops and engineers having to work on the cheapest and shittiest windows laptops is a thing in every German company where the software isn't the core product(embedded, IoT, hardware, automotive, mechanical, chemical, finance etc.) because Macs are expensive and since beancounters are valued more than SW engineers they can make themselves look like heroes in front of management by showing them how much money they saved the company by leasing a fleet of cheap machines for everyone, regardless of their job, from the local HP/Dell/Lenovo dealer vs the productivity loss of their developers that they won't bother considering.
I only saw good machines in companies where only software was their business(mostly web shops) so management there knew the value of providing good laptops and monitors.
The irony is that as I move into management, I less and less see the value of me personally having a powerful laptop. My job is Jira, Github, and Zoom; why should I carry around a 16” MBP for all the power I don’t need?
Wait until you need to run Microsoft Teams. You’ll need to carry an entire supercomputer to run that pile of shit and even then it won’t be smooth.
Even Jira is not too far off these days unfortunately despite being a relatively simple tool (but they needed to justify hiring tons of JavaScript developers).
At least we can be safe in the knowledge that Teams will be the only bloated Electron app Microsoft make a core part of the Office suite.
There is no way most company issue laptops can run two programs that resource heavy at once, without Windows 10 randomly closing other applications or flashing a black screen at you.
What angers me about Jira isn’t the slowness of the backend - that I can wait. It’s the slowness of the frontend that’s the problem, which is a combination of a JS-heavy front end as well as its hard dependency on the backend, where as basic HTML forms & page navigations typically leave the previous page interactive until the response from the backend arrives so you can still look at the existing page as well as allowing you to cancel a page load and still keep the currently loaded page.
if you want teams to go through a proxy, they basically say "open all ports tcp and udp to microsoft.com + even more"
I think it might be like 52.0.0.0/8 or something
Zoom is the new culprit. Occasionally it’ll demand so much from my computer that the 100W charger won’t be able to keep up, causing my battery to begin to discharge.
Are you running the from the browser and not the app?
My biggest Zoom gripe is being unable to control how much bandwidth it uses. 360p is fine for the others and I on the call when we’re not sharing screens.
If it weren’t for that, I could télé-work from the cabin a lot more... stupid Canadian mobile providers...
I work in a worlwide (german) industry / automotive company. The group leader can decide what Notebook, PC or Workstation his team gets. We can choose between a normal office HP Notebook/PC or a pretty good version of a HP Z-Book or a fast Workstation. Also I think most external tech guys who came to our company, they usually have real good hardware. At least in my company now, the managment has just normal office notebooks or convertibles.
Not strictly true, but overall I'd say it is accurate. There are more and more companies in Germany that are becoming tech aware even though the tech is secondary and they realize there are productivity gains to be had from giving their tech employees proper tools.
Still, that's yet another version of the beancounters perspective.
Definitely not my observation (working in Germany in automotive). All of us are using one of the generic PC. To be honest, our PCs have been pretty reliable, suitable for the purpose. The service quality is also surprisingly adequate.
The only time I see MacBook are when we get the consultants visiting us. They are always decked out in the latest Apple gear.
I still dream about it. And it's 20 years ago. That guy and his buddies caused us so much misery it isn't funny.
Another Bauer story; prior to the investment: he had fear of flying, and was an asshole to the people that he perceived as lower on the social ladder than himself. So when he was nasty to the stewardess on a very small airplane (10 seater, twin prop) flying from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo and the pilots caught on to his fear they got their revenge on him by doing all kinds of borderline legal aerobatics with the plane.
Bauer and I were the only passengers, I had a great time but made sure to sit where it was safe. He was as white as a sheet when we landed, and made a great point of being polite to the stewardess on the way back.
One asshole deflated, props to those pilots (pun intended) for standing up for their colleague.
Great story. During my life I've found that assholes of the narcissistic kind have fears or insecurities that clash with their bravado posturing (e.g., a primal fear of dogs, flying, paranoia of being talked about behind their back, cheated on, moving away from their hometown, being seen as bad dressers -- those are the ones I remember). I have always found this odd. I know nothing about psychology, but maybe there's a correlation there?
>One asshole deflated, props to those pilots (pun intended) for standing up for their colleague.
so, someone was socially rude, so some pilots decided to risk the lives of everybody on board to teach a lesson.
Aerobatics , even if 'borderline-legal', are still more stressful on the plane and components.
Stress still causes early failure, even if the stress was produced with legal maneuvers.
Hopping curbs in a passenger car is not usually illegal, it'll just destroy the car prematurely.
Spontaneous aerobatics still risk injury from gravity-flung objects in the cabin.
So, i'm glad the person you dislike had a lesson taught. I'm less glad that the crew acted unprofessionally.
I'm very glad that no incidents occurred as a result. The sky isn't the place for revenge and vengeance, especially on passenger flights.
I really hope that the crew has matured since then. There are plenty of ways companies and professionals can refuse service without risking collateral damage like that.
The problem is that they put everyone lives at risk. It doesn't matter how convinced you are of your abilities if your life and the life of others is at immediate risk (like in a plane or on a bus)
Noone's life was at risk. It was just mildly more exciting than a normal flight and well within the range of permitted stresses on that particular plane.
GGP made an assumption and then reacted to that assumption as though it was a fact. We weren't doing loopings or Immelmans, just a couple of nice steep banks and a pretty steep ascent/descent. If the plane would have not been able to handle that it shouldn't have been flying in the first place. I've been through lots worse in single engine GA planes in rural Canada.
question : would the pilots be at fault if the victim of the prank had suffered a heart attack or stress-related stroke due to the thrill-ride?
Not legally, morally.
I tend to think so, given that creating a thrill-ride is outside the scope and purview of being a private pilot.
A professional, acting outside the scope of his profession, who seems to be acting with malice or disregard creates a situation that could quite literally kill a person who has certain conditions (even unknowingly).
>Noone's life was at risk.
I can't do the mental acrobatics that are necessary to see that as a zero risk situation.
It's not just the airframe that the pilot is tasked with worrying about, the safety of the occupants comes first.
If planes cannot maneuver in the air without significant fear of fatal injury they should (and would) not be flying.
This goes beyond your comment: but sometimes it feels like there is a growing tendency to value safety - or perceived safety - over the rest of our humanity.
In Germany, even the slightest acceptance of violence usage against capitalists and Nazis is going to get you a shitstorm from the far right to the center/left left.
The result? Just look at how effective militant French protests have been in keeping neoliberal attacks on worker rights at bay, and how unsuccessful German protests have been.
Violence is regulated (in essentially all of the world) - that's very different from unacceptable.
The state, perhaps through the police or military, can exercise violence often without consequence. You can legally be violent in self-defence, to varying extents.
That's nitpicking. It is clear that failed states are those with nontrivial scale violence perpetually initiated by non-state actors. The strength of the state equates to its capacity to limit the scale of others' violence. US gun laws, globally speaking, are a statistical anomaly, and if you started using guns against others with any scale or frequency the government would surely intervene.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. - Goethe
US gun laws are irrelevant, since the legality of using violence in self-defense (note that we aren't even talking about lethal force here!) is applicable to a lot more than guns. And yes, in most countries, it is legal, although certain limits of proportionality etc may be imposed, and there may be a duty to retreat if possible.
But also, US gun laws insofar as they pertain to the use of guns for self-defense aren't as anomalous as many people think they are. There are a few other countries in which it's possible for a regular citizen to get a permit to carry a handgun openly or concealed - Czechia, for example.
It’s not nitpicking. Almost all states recognize the legitimate use of violence for self defense, even if the specific methods permitted vary on a state by state basis. Thus if your definition of a failed state is one in which the government doesn’t have sole right to violence, then you end up with the rather absurd position that all states are failed.
When generalizing it is taken for granted that one discusses the general case not an extreme case. It is not possible to hold a discussion in general terms with people who insist on nitpicking. All generalisations are invalid. Some are more invalid than others.
On some level I agree ... but I can't in all honesty get behind this statement 100%. For example I enjoyed seeing the videos of Richard Spencer (the "dapper" white nationalist) and Billy Steele (guy shouting on the tube about how black people are "less than him") getting punched in the face.
Don't know if this makes me an asshole or a human.
I love Bill Burr’s take on this. I can’t find the clip, but the resolution was that after receiving a punch, maybe you’ll reconsider “ehh maybe i was being a bit of a dick back there.”
I never punched anyone, but people who ruin your life as described by the commenter deserve it, maybe they’ll become better people.
> after receiving a punch ... maybe they’ll become better people.
That seems like the logic of a supervillain or sociopath. "When they did something bad, it's because they're a bad person that I'm allowed to hurt, but when I'm violent it's because I'm making the world a better place."
There may be times when that works, or it's the least bad option, but my instinct tells me that the sort of person that most deserves a punch is also the sort of person who is most likely to respond to that violence by doubling down and hurting more people (their victims often being those who can't defend themselves).
I punched a bully in the stomach at school (after many months of the school doing nothing to address it), and after that he completely left me alone. It was a small school, so I'm fairly sure he didn't move on to anyone else either. A few years later, we even became friends, our younger siblings (5 years younger in each case) become friends (without knowing about the incident in question), and since starting his own company has done paid work for our family (which we wouldn't have allowed had there still be any animosity).
I've no doubt violence begets violence in most cases, but it can also improve the situation for both sides in others.
The legal term you're looking for is "serious bodily injury". Reasonable expectation thereof is the threshold for the use of lethal force in self-defense in most US jurisdictions, for example.
So is the violence of the police and of other government agencies (think sheriffs enforcing eviction orders) acceptable? When is legitimate use of force crossing the line to abuse? When are people allowed to defend themselves?
It's funny to see how in many Western governments the (legitimate!) protest of the people in Hongkong is cheered upon, but BLM, Yellow Vests other domestic protests are discarded...
Saying "violence is unacceptable" is something one can only say as a member of the privileged majority. For minorities, for marginalized people, for poor people though... the lines are way more blurry than blanket black-and-white statements.
And for the record: I'm not a friend of pointless militant acts but I will not dare to judge over anyone not as privileged as I am to come to a different opinion.
Alright, you are now arguing that in response to violence, counter violence may be acceptable and therefore my post must be coming from a position of privilege. My statement was about the original act of violence. It would benefit everybody to focus on that one, instead of immediately screaming "but I have to be allowed to punch back!!!1"
P.S.: You have no idea about my gender, skin color, sexual orientation or social class. Please don't just assume things.
Violence is efficient though, otherwise why was Saddam Hussein deposed? If Country's cant settle their differences with politics, what else do you have left? At least our leaders show us what is acceptable behaviours in their books but it also demonstrates their hypocrisy when ordinary members of the public meter out their own violence, although I do acknowledge some violence is just plain mindless eg drug and alcohol fuelled.
Difficult to say. The Iraq War and the occupation disaster afterwards were both inept catastrophes in so many ways for both the Iraqis and for the U.S population that had to piss away those trillions of dollars. But on the other hand, even the somewhat unstable modern Iraq is better off than it was under the rule of an extraordinarily violent, extremely brutal regime like Saddam's. He wasn't just some soft-touch authoritarian in the style of Turkey's president, for example. Hussein was more like a miniature Stalin (one of his personal heroes) in his sheer ruthlessness towards his own people. Just a couple examples: what his government did to the marsh Arabs of the Euphrates and the Halabja chemical attack along with other atrocities against the kurds in the north of the country.
None of this is in any way a defense of the monstrous collateral damage of the U.S occupation or of the U.S government's reasons for that war, but now that it's happened, the country is better off than it was under Saddam himself.
> 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 mean, they weren't versed enough to fool many Wirecard shorts or financial journalists, who had a lot less authority and power to investigate the inner workings of the company. Maybe in the absence of these warnings they could be excused for missing it. But when you get it handed to you on a silver platter?
Let's face it, the FT is published in English, and I would not be irritated at all if BaFin was still looking to issue a call for proposals to find a translator to translate the FT articles into German, on the day the whole scam was finally exposed by EY deciding it was not worth the risk anymore.
To be clear, I'm not alleging this was the case and have no basis on which to suggest it, but it's not all that unlikely they could have been coerced or bribed, right? But that might be a stretch.
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.
My wife started her career as an internal auditor at a UK financial company - she was apparently repeatedly told to stop finding problems, her manager acknowledged that the things she was finding were real problems but nobody wanted to have formal reports describing them.
She left after a colleague who apparently spent most of his time asleep in a cupboard got promoted over her....
The other person was probably told to stop finding problems as well, and he was complying. I once told a manager the only way to not do what I was doing would be for me to be asleep. Hell, maybe it was so easy he could do it in his sleep?
Perhaps this is naïveté on my part, but I imagine that if I worked for an organisation whose explicit purpose is to look for things which need fixing or certify that no known issues are present, I would be surprised if “shoot the messenger” was — even metaphorically — a real policy.
I would also ask myself how far the rot went, because if (for example) this organisation was also supposed to audit the government and yet promoted those who “slept in a cupboard” over those who worked diligently, then I would expect the country to suffer a very large and very surprising economic disaster.
Hi, yes, this is largely how audit firms work. If they find a problem, they will not be hired next year.
That said - don’t despair! The purpose is NOT to catch purposefully-fraudulent CFOs. That’s the SEC’s job. It’s much more of a forcing mechanism for otherwise-honest CFOs: they know they have to justify what they’re doing somehow, and the auditor knows that if something will inevitably blow up anyway, they can’t sign off. So it just arrests the slippery slope when honest mistakes are made.
“Slippery slope” is an (often misused) metaphor; the bottom of the slope is generic badness, the top is a good place to be, and the slope is slippery because if you start sliding down it can be very difficult to stop.
While “arrest” normally means a police officer putting someone in handcuffs, it is derived from derived from the French word “arrêt“ meaning 'to stop or stay', and can still be used in that sense.
Thus, “arrest the slippery slope” means “prevent bad behaviour”.
While that is worth pointing out, I would still be concerned in such circumstances. As I say, perhaps naively so — I have no familiarity with the norms of that industry.
I think being told not to find so many problems she could perhaps have coped with - having someone who was apparently unconscious most of the time promoted ahead of her was what really did it.
Well, it is clear that he was promoted because he wasn't interested. It allowed the rest of the people there to get away with stuff that they shouldn't have been doing.
Leaving was the best option that your wife had, in such a case you really don't want to stick around until the house burns down.
Thankfully there are very strong incentives for audit companies not to f-up. They themselves are not audited and are not public. Their reputation means a lot to them.
With this situation, there is a reasonable expectation for EY to lose clients. Partners will also face some consequence. Most likely they will be let go and removed from accreditation by CPA (in the US). There are several high profile cases where partners get sacked[0].
Partly false. We were audited every year by one of our competitors. There is a strong likely hood that the reason she was told to stop finding problems is because the de minimus limit (the dollar figure at which we don't care) is truly, and I mean TRULY massive for the kind of companies that are audited by EY, PWC, KPMG, and Deloitte. I refuse to believe for one second that a serious issue was swept under the rug by a senior or manager.
As for the guy sleeping in cupboards...the staff at those firms reguarly work 80 hour weeks (not the "I work 80 hour weeks counting all kinds of stupid things" but the "I was at the client site or in the home office for 80 hours this week". It was a very common occurence for hard working staff members to take naps at the client (most likely because last night was a 2am night). Promotions at these firms are often very competitive as the organization is an "Up or out" organization designed to chew up fresh college grads.
The peer review is conducted by an independent evaluator, known as a peer reviewer. The AICPA oversees the program, and the review is administered by an entity approved by the AICPA to perform that role. 2. The peer review helps to monitor a CPA firm's accounting and auditing practice (practice monitoring).
>There is a strong likely hood that the reason she was told to stop finding problems is because the de minimus limit (the dollar figure at which we don't care) is truly, and I mean TRULY massive for the kind of companies that are audited by EY, PWC, KPMG, and Deloitte. I refuse to believe for one second that a serious issue was swept under the rug by a senior or manager.
That's a big claim for you to make given that you don't know the company, the size of their clients, or even whether or not anyone went to jail over the proceeding decades.
So no legal risk, but there is still professional risk. When external auditors come in or an issue is found that impacts customers, they could scapegoat their internal (deliberately made useless) team, fire them, and have a go at using that as part of their defense/response. The higher-ups would be ok if they can pull it off, but your wife would've been out a job and with an inability to get a reference from them (beyond the basic: She was employed here from X-Y).
Best plan for everyone is to get out of shady companies like that ASAP.
I once had a technical discussion with my manager, he wanted me to use a technical solution that did not work, while making me fully responsible for the result.
In the end I implemented both my solution and his. Mine worked like a charm, his literally caught on fire (it was power electronics development). Got fired anyway...
They hired a junior make sure he would do as he was told to, and developed my solution. In the end, “my solution” was what anyone would have developed after some research on the problem.
The manager was one of the company owners, so he was well motivated, but he was an academic with little world experience that though he knew better than the industry.
The largest pop/fire I saw in some past power electronics work was a poor implementation in trying to combine the output of multiple DC-DC converters. The original caught fire in front of a potential customer, in a demo. What I saw was a repeat of the experiment, in the lab. A manager that would always say "just add more capacitance" was involved. I guess firing and fires go with managers like that.
Yes, we hear this all the time. It's just kids with checklists who have absolutely no idea about the nature of the questions they are asking, why they are asking them and have absolutely no plan for off-script follow up questions based on the answers given.
A lot of these auditors come from a financial background and they treat IT in much the same way, as if there is some kind of checksum they can calculate which will tell them if the company is healthy from an IT perspective or not.
Companies that are certified tend to be very good at process but are sometimes surprisingly bad at the actual IT. But it's all documented perfectly.
As a former IT auditor I can only confirm your statement. After I did my master in business administration with a touch of CS (it was called Master of Information, Media and Technology Management - and I really just learned basic Java, SAP, and one course about IT architecture) I got a job at a big four auditing company as an IT auditor. I was literally just going through some checklists and at that time I had no idea about the systems or technology I was auditing. After two years I got so frustrated with my job I decided to get a second degree in CS. The more I studied, the more obvious it became to me that someone with a CS degree never would do such boring work if there are other job opportunities in IT.
So, as someone who spent a lifetime in IT, I actually enjoy the work. It gives me a way to give other companies, many more than I could normally work for, a way to benefit from that experience. Our little crew is composed of veteran IT people, all with lots of real world experience, we get the privilege of looking at lots of different companies, both the good and the bad. Which in turn gives us more knowledge.
Glad to hear you enjoy your work. For me, it was just going through some checklists under enormous time pressure at large financial institutions and mostly alone, without any of my team members on site. If I were to do the job today, I might be able to look more into the details of the systems/applications I am auditing, immerse myself in them and have some meaningful conversations with the people I am auditing. Thank you for your perspective
Similarly, I remember at my last job management would start talking about the "ISO corner" each year, where all the forms that we never, ever touched sat. This of course coincided with our ISO 9001 recertification. A few developers would be coached on what to say to the certifier, he'd be there for 2 days, and then we'd go back to business as usual.
By the way, ISO organization does not endorse, check or enforce compliance of any of the certification providers, and can't basically do anything against someone who just sells ISO certificates in shiny bevel, even if they wanted.
That said, all the ISO standards are corporate moonspeak and bullshit themselves and do not bear any practical sense. (All that, for example, looong document on infosec ISO 27001 says is "try to be secure, my friend")
Mixed bag. ISO27001 when taken seriously and implemented throughout a company that means well and has the resources to do so will at least guarantee some level of process to be present. This then needs to be backed up with actual IT and security knowledge to be effective, and that is more often than not where the problems are.
So as a rule we treat an ISO 27001 certificate not so much as a checkbox item meaning we can skip certain parts of our audit, but as a nice-to-have which may help speed up the interview process because we at least know what terminology to use.
In practice there is too little difference between companies with or without such certification to see it as anything other than a marketing tool.
I believe I can provide some color as my wife is an auditor and I work in IT. We’ve had this discussion before.
Audit is really freaking expensive; Domain experts too. While there is a checklist that given to the auditor, the person asking those questions are usually senior or early manager level. The person has little experience in IT but usually has a small BS detector because of previous audits. That checklist is then sent to an internal domain expert to verify. Follow up questions may occur.
Having said that, this is strictly for compliance and “covering your own butt”. This past year a firm was found negligent because they didn’t catch fraud because they simply “checked the box”. Since then, most firms have introduced rudimentary IT training for auditors responsible for said checklist. (All staff have to take the classes, when at level).
TL;DR an auditor cannot have same knowledge as IT person and audit time is expensive. They’re trained to earmark fraud and to verify, to the best of their abilities, they are not signing off on a lie. Shit is hard and no system is perfect.
This isn't for "closing a deal" but because the audit co is signing off on financials. This is why in a companies public reporting, they have a section about possible damage from losing customer info. That's legalize for:
1. The Public Company being audited isn't going to spend money on a real technical audit and may in the future lose customer info, etc.
2. The financial auditing company doesn't have enough experience to properly asses the situation. They did the best they could but they're no experts.
> TL;DR an auditor cannot have same knowledge as IT person and audit time is expensive.
Code audits and pentesting are a thing you can buy. But yes, they're even more expensive. Turns out security isn't considered valuable enough for most.
Right, that's exactly why the audit company isn't signing off on code audit or pen testing. They can only sign off on a simple checklist, if a caveat is listed in the financial reporting.
They have no proficiency or enough people who know what they're doing. The approach is to meet the lowest common denominator set by the SEC or is expected from investors.
I am an IT person, and I put this first, and Auditor for 27001. Wouldn't say that you can't bullshit me, cause who knows all.
I go in and look at the absolute basics. Like is there a person responsible for Security? What are his responsibilities? In the last 12 Months is there anything documented that proofs that he did his job? If so did the management followed through on his findings? If not why?
You can fake all of this. But at some point its easier to do the job than to fake it. Well at least this is what I hope...
That's exactly it. They're seen as an unneccesary cost because there are no real penalties for being compromised. Though this is fortunately changing, which has caused companies to begin to take this stuff more serious than in the past.
So, assuming what’s reported in that article is true, is Russia a black hat finance bug bounty hunter of sorts? They identify ongoing high-profile fraud in Western countries and use that leverage to turn the executive into intelligence assets? Or is it the other way around? He was already working with Russia and then just happened to commit massive fraud at the same time?
I guess I’m just having a hard time understanding how a person can get themselves into such a situation. I can’t believe it’s just greed that allows it to happen but perhaps that’s naive of me.
You can bet your bottom dollar that Russia and Russia backed entities (as well as Chinese) are spending a lot of money to try to gain footholds in Western Europe and America through all kinds of schemes. Whether this was one of those is up for grabs, it could easily be. But it is a fact that these things are happening.
How they might get themselves into such a situation?
Just one sample: The company might have been in financial trouble, not able to fulfill its obligations in the short term, and so a decision was made to pull in some Russian 'cheap' capital for a short term loan.
There is a very large amount of illicit Russian money flowing around and it pops up in the most respectable places.
So it isn't necessarily just greed, it could be that the investor that you are taking on board in turn is a front for that sort of capital (always ask for the source of the capital from your investors, if they are coy about it then better go somewhere else), or that the founders are too naive to realize that they are making deals with people they should stay away from (see comment above for my own personal story).
> or that the founders are too naive to realize that they are making deals with people they should stay away from
Given that there are reports that Marsalek tried to put up 15.000 mercenaries to take over Libyan border controls (possibly with a relation to the politics of his homeland Austria and it's anti immigration policy!), it may very well also be that Marsalek knew what he was getting into and went all in out of a search for fame, a real life Austrian 007.
I'm currently living in Ecuador and skipping out of the country with millions and heading to Europe is the preferred route for many politicians here. They get safe haven there with their families and are not extradited, even when the government tries to get them back for trial. So, this is actually perfectly cool with the EU coming from another western country, not just Russia/China. Money seems to make those EU principles of the rule of law very negotiable. Guess they have the inverse problem as well when someone runs off with their money.
Because it is more than likely that Wirecard was not just running a front for illegal gambling and questionably legal (in terms of youth protection compliance) porn sites, but also a front for Russian GRU/FSB to distribute cash to agents and sources.
There is no other reasonable explanation as for why he is under the care of GRU.
Also there are rich people in poor countries that embezzle money and then move to a western country. They are able to use the laws and protections of that western country to block any extradition.
That may be true when it comes fresh from the ATM, but otherwise is mostly false. People physically handling money would tell you that it indeed STINKS!
That's incorrect. Access to the latrines was free, the money was in order to be allowed to empty the latrines, with urine having fairly high concentrations of certain minerals and lots of applications (for instance: curing leather).
> World's Most Wanted Man Jan Marsalek Located in Belarus
Belarus. That's certainly an interesting place to be right now, and a place that has more important things to deal with than a high-profile white-collar criminal.
> Bellingcat, in collaboration with its investigative partners Der Spiegel and the Insider,
Ugh, one of the former top journalists of "Der Spiegel" has shown they will happily publish anything that fits their readers narrative. It wouldn't be surprising if half of the facts they found were made up to make the story look more epic than it is.
(2) There are undoubtedly links between Marsalek and Russia
(3) It is plausible (no extradition, reasonably close by so family can still visit)
(4) There is circumstantial evidence
(5) Many places where he could go to would actually be far more dangerous to him than Belarus
So obviously, this is not hard proof but it is a lot better than nothing at all, if you can dispute any of the bits they list as facts rather than speculation (which they were surprisingly candid about) then that would change matters.
For now, it is the best that I could find, the list of countries where he could go, live in relative luxury and safety while on the lam for German justice isn't all that long and Belarus features near the top of that list.
> if you can dispute any of the bits they list as facts rather than speculation (which they were surprisingly candid about) then that would change matters.
A problem with that is that some of their facts are based on "documents they reviewed". I do not have these documents and I cannot find any alternative source for the DA0000051 claim. All I have is past occasions of the Spiegel making stories more exciting and interesting for their readers by making up facts.
But that doesn't say anything about this particular story, and Der Spiegel has come clean about those instances which is the reason you can make that claim to begin with.
Nobody's perfect, but if I get to chose between Der Spiegel and Fox News or Bild I know where I'd put my money.
And of course you don't have the documents, it is pretty rare that a news article would be accompanied by all the evidence the publisher has acquired, if only because that could easily put their sources at risk.
> and Der Spiegel has come clean about those instances which is the reason you can make that claim to begin with.
After ignoring complaints for years and threatening one of their journalists for having the gall to question their golden goose. They only came clean about because there was no denying the evidence said journalist gathered and if they let someone else publish it they couldn't put their spin on it. Their world class fact checking team at least turned out to be a group of glorified spell checkers.
Given that nobody else has seen those documents the reverse is an appeal to authority and I find it relevant that said authority has a history of embellish facts.
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.
I do this for a living and if there is one thing that I have found it is that due to COVID-19 on-site visits are no longer an option (especially not internationally) and this has caused us to be blind to certain classes of problems. It is a lot of work to get around that remotely and to not have a drop in quality because of that. We are at least aware of the problem but even then this is a tricky thing to solve. When looking through a keyhole you can get a completely different view of a company than the one you get when you spend a day on their premises.
Beyond your fair points, my statement is unfair because it's trivially true. "Transparency into critical vetting" hides the complexity of individual comprehension, single points of failure, etc. I just know I have very little trust into opaque processes that randomly blow up
On other forums people are taking advantage of the situation to refinance their homes where they don't want a privacy inspection (medical marijuana grows which are legal, but under certain circumstances banks may ask questions)
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.
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.
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.
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?
Why are people always so surprised when “disruptive” organisations actually end up doing a bunch of weird shit?
The website is user-hostile; if you accept the Advertisements it attempts to set a cookie which the Firefox tracking protection layer won't allow to happen, resulting in an error and no article access.
That website wasn't made by journalists, but by their bosses. If the news is going to be 'for pay' only then effectively being informed equates to being wealthy and the not so wealthy will be preyed on by the 'fake news' department, because to them spreading the news is the business.
So there is a very strong case to be made for keeping news free for the masses, even when they run adblockers.
In the movie Thank You For Smoking a tobacco industry spokesman calls it the 'Yuppie Nuremberg Defense.' Instead of "I had orders" it's "I had a mortgage."
This was never stated (no cookies), the tracking protection layer blocks cross-site and social media cookies amongst other bad ideas. This browser has hundreds of active, working, viable cookies in play (to include HackerNews login) -- it is this specific website which is incorrect for trying to use a known-malicious cookie setting technique in 2020 and violate my rights to privacy.
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.
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.
So I've always seen Wirecard as a bunch of crooks.
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.
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.