TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Wirecard: The Shaved Poodle Affair feat. Dan McCrum

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

This week, Riley, Milo, and Alice speak with FT reporter and author Dan McCrum (@FD) about his forthcoming book 'Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth.' It is of course about Wirecard, and it's got some amazing details that we simply lose our minds about as Dan recounts them. Hope you enjoy! Buy Dan's book here! If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We are going to tour Australia in November, and there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Brisbane https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/trashfuture-live-in-brisbane-additional-show-tickets-396915263237 and Canberra: https://au.patronbase.com/_StreetTheatre/Productions/TFLP/Performances *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this bonus. See, I did it. I did it. You did do it. I did it. That's right, Riley. You managed it. I'm going to ruin it for you by doing it myself.

God damn it. We are getting personal with each other on the bonus episode. And we are here with, again, another person. It's Miley. It's Riley. It's Miley and Riley. It's Malice, Rilo, all of these things. It's those three.

Malice is a great nickname for you. And we're here with someone who it is very embarrassing to be doing all the bonus moaning in front of. It is Dan McCrubb, who is an investigative reporter at the FT and author of the book Money Man. It's a hot start-up. A hot start-up. Yeah.

Money Man. Billion dollar fraud and a fight for the truth, all about Wirecard. Wirecard. Yeah, that's right. We are... I have read this book. I urge... I always urge everyone to buy the books that we talk about.

I really, really urge you to buy this one. It's a lot of fun. Because as we know, the fans of Trashita are huge Wirehead heads. Wirehead? Yeah. Wirecard. Wirecard heads. What is it?

What is the demonym for someone who's a real Wirecard fan? Lastly, can two separate rooms at the moment? I've never thought about that. Why? No. I can't say that aloud. Because it would be... I see, Dan, that you've rolled these Libyan mercenaries with you.

So, perhaps we could ask them. And so, if you remember, if you don't know Wirecard, it's so complicated and big that it's not worth... And we have so much to talk about that we're not going to recap it in much detail on this episode. We can go into our previous episodes or read the book. Yeah. Exactly.

But just for the benefit of our lazier or forgetful listeners, Dan, can you give like a brief summary of the Wirecard situation before we go into the details? Okay. So, Wirecard was on the face of it, like a normal little company which did something boring, sprinkled technology over it, and made it extraordinary. So, clean. Yeah. Like a regular country money farmer.

Exactly. They processed payments, they helped you if you had a business to like take credit and debit card payments, and then somehow they just did it way better and bigger and faster and more profitable than everyone else. And I took a look at it and was like, seems a bit fraughty. And we can say that now. Yes. I mean, that's one of the rare pleasures to just go, you're definitely a little bit

fraughty. Legally, it was a bit fraughty. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. They're suing us to say that. Actually, it was very fraughty. And so, what happened with this, I remember it was this company that begins by doing some

legitimate, if legal gray area payment processing, ends up just largely falsifying its numbers and then crediting the sales to an office that turned out to be like an empty apartment in Dubai or some fishermen's huts in the Philippines. Yeah. We went and knocked on the door and they're like, hi, yeah, we're looking for the payments company, please. Yeah. And my colleague walks in and she's, we don't know what we're expecting.

She's like, is it going to be gangsters? You know, maybe there's going to be a real business there. And she, she knocks on the gate, walks in and there are two men with a white poodle on a glass table. And they give me a haircut. This is what's at the heart of Wirecard. And I say, all right, okay, I think we've found the magic in the business here. Yeah.

It's the poodle group. The magic in the business is that it's a dream sequence in a Jim Drummond film. Yeah. We've invested all of your money into this very expensive poodle. You can't see how, but, and the fur from this poodle fetches a lot of money on the black market. Let me tell you, which is why we're shaving it. Guaranteed.

Race of return. It can't lose. Also, right? This, the revenue of the company's allegedly based out of these huts and empty flats was, you know, fictional. And with the holes in the balance sheet, just explained away by them saying, oh, we're waiting for the payments to process and then inventing some revenue from somewhere else that you then claimed was the revenue from the first place and saying, oh, we're waiting

for the revenue from that other place to process. So it's so long as it seems like you just keep kept it moving. Then KPMG says, EY rather, it just says, well, you seem like nice guys. I guess we'll sign it off. I mean, forgive me for being an idiot here, but I feel like the point of fraud is it's supposed to be quite lucrative. So if you're doing fraud and it's lucrative, and one of the things you're trying to do is not get caught doing fraud, when you're, when you're doing the fake office in Dubai,

why wouldn't you hire just like a couple of guys who look like they're not doing fraud to sit there and go beep, beep, beep, tapping on some keyboards rather than two guys shaving a poodle? Poodle grooming time. Poodle was not going to groom itself. It's actually the most valuable part of the business was the dog grooming salon. I actually, that is a good question. I'd love, I'd love to hear the answer to why didn't they bother making any of this stuff

look legitimate? So they did do that, but that time they didn't know we were coming. Oh, okay. So this was the unannounced visit where we're like, ah, we've worked out who the partner is, we'll go and we'll just go and take a look. And then, then there's this whole bit where it all starts to fall apart and the auditor's like, oh, right. Okay.

Yeah. We should probably go and take a look. We should probably have taken a look at their books at some point. Oh crap. I probably shouldn't have said it wasn't fraudulent. So they show up in the, you know, the rooms are full of people doing payment processing things or rather there's rooms of people tapping at keyboards and the auditors walk over and have a look at the screen and they're like, seems to be payment stuff on there.

Numbers on it. Yeah. Surprising number of Poodle's wandering around. It's the BBC News fake typing news segment thing. Yeah. Absolutely. Look, there's lots of numbers on there. I'm seeing ones, nines, different combinations, decimal points, you know, all seems in order.

Thank you gentlemen. That's the rule for fraud is as long as their numbers that is presumed to be a legitimate business enterprise. Also, this was all sort of the brainchild of a few strange German men, most notably, and I think who's become something of a celebrity in the eyes of the host and audience of this show, one Jan Marselech. Jan Marselech. A man who is very much alive and well.

Yeah. He's inside a barrel. He's listening to his favorite music. The AC is on. Don't worry about him. So can you give us like, actually, you know, we're going to hold off on the Jan Marselech thing. I want to sort of do a little more of the different guy, Chris Tarrant, but we don't want to give

you that there. So basically, the whole story itself, we will go into Jan Marselech. I find the whole story itself as, and I had Allison are talking to this earlier, kind of has the arc of a Scorsese movie where a guy, a German guy, I always wanted to be a payment process. Sort of. Exactly. Same.

On the phone. We've become too powerful. Essentially. Yeah. Chris Bauer, a van sneaker distributor in Germany, once hold on Milo, hold on, don't celebrate yet. After sharing, like after sitting next to hustler magazines, Larry Flint on a plane. Yes.

Sides to make money by processing payments for pornography online and realizes that this is essentially making money by doing nothing. And then at every stage that this model was challenged, everyone involved, up to and including the German state just kept doubling down. I mean, that's pretty much it really. Oh, right. It's astonishing. The penthouse forum.

I have an idea. I never thought this would happen to me. This is my payment process, so it would be entirely fraudulent. I was, I ended up in this crazy party with these two guys. What is this? We did some free shit and then like one guy, one like German sneaker salesman has a conversation with Larry Flint on a plane. And then 30 years later, Edo Kerniawan is like flying around the entire world trying

to improvise Filipino fishing huts into looking like payment processors because money for nothing. If there's one story thing I've learned about Wirecard, it's that if you can make money for nothing and you basically can't do anything else, then you just keep hustling as hard as you can. You never look back. Yeah, grind some. Yeah.

I mean, that's basically it. Yeah. They find this great business though. So he gives up on the van sneakers and it's like, I can make way more money doing this. It's all porn and gambling and they're making money hand over fist and then it all just starts to go away. You know, I mean, they're not even thieves. They're just like normal businessmen who are going, ah, nice business you got here.

It's a shame if something happened to it like us walk out the door and take it away with us. Yeah, of course. And that's what happens. A couple of guys are like, I reckon we could do this. We'll take these clients and we'll go start our own thing and see you guys later. Because the actual story of Wirecard itself, like Christopher Bauer, the guy who starts the first payment processor, he doesn't start a company called Wirecard.

He starts a company where people can pay for porn online via their phone bill and that company buys a struggling business called Wirecard as they expand into other markets. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's where Marcus Brown comes in. Well, we've got to talk about Jan Marselech now. Okay.

Okay. You know what? We've teased this for long enough. In prison to come right now. I'm going to ask you one question about Jan Marselech and then we're going to, that's going to be the key that opens it all. Was Jan Marselech for real intelligence connected or was he just trying to big dick everyone? I mean, no, man, Jan Marselech is this crazy talented guy, like he drops out of high school

and starts a tech company and then he gets poached and he's as charming as they come. Everyone goes on about, he could just talk and talk and you feel amazing and he makes you feel like anything you're going to do together is going to be beautiful and he throws money around and he sort of wraps people in this spell, but he's also just like a total bullshit artist and he just makes it up as he goes along and he's a total chancellor. And so the thing is, I think he kind of had like a thing for James Bond and just wanted to hang out. Oh no.

He just wanted to feel, he wanted to feel a bit dangerous and a bit like German James Bond or Austrian James Bond. Okay. So there's this moment with Jan where he's really successful, they've done the whole India thing where they've stolen like 300 million euros and set themselves up in this mansion in Munich called P61. You know, he thinks sort of like a four meter ceilings, white walls, fussy art, that sort of thing.

And he's basically sitting around and he can't go on holiday. Every time he goes on holiday, he lasts about two days with his girlfriend and then it's just like, I've got to work, I've got to fly around the world again. You've got to get back to the basement family. And his friends who include a Russian mercenary are there going... Great friends. They're good guys to be friends with. Everyone needs a Russian mercenary in their life.

It's like the expendables per company. Yeah. So they're going, okay, Jan, well, what do you want to do for a holiday? And he's like, I want to do something which no one else in the world can do. So his friend goes, well, you know, my friends in Russia, we've just conquered Palmyra. Do you want to go have a stroll around? Yeah. And he's like, yeah, that sounds fog.

And then so they fly him in. The Wagner Group tour package. It literally was with the Wagner Group, right? The Wagner River cruises. That's what it had been. I mean, yeah, that seems pretty likely. But then this question, is he for real or not? So he turns up with the best body armor money can buy.

You know, like carbon fiber helmet, this sort of jacket which has like a bulletproof vest like built into it. I don't know. Supreme body armor jacket. You know, the Armani Kevlar, that sort of thing. Sorry, tour guide of the Valkyries had to get that one in. There we go. And the Russian soldiers sort of, sorry, Russian mercenaries, you know, the little

green men, they say, Jan, this is some lovely stuff you've got here. It's very nice. But if we take you for a walk with this, every single sniper in the area is going to think you're the number one VIP and they're going to shoot you dead. And so you have to leave it all in the hotel. Okay, I'm going to put that in the against column for Izzy for real. That sounds about right. Just like, well, no, I'm incapable of not being as flashy as possible, which is why

here in this World War One platoon, I've decided to wear a bright neon flashing helmet. That's right. He's wearing like the red officer's mess tailcoat and yeah, I love this guy. He's so fun. Yeah. Well, get ready to learn some more about him because in fact there are actually some kind of trade crafty things that are involved between the two of you because as for example, there are scenes recount in the book where one of your colleagues is going to have lunch

with him because he thinks he's going to flip him. But little does he know that a bunch of again, FT, I imagine just normal reporters who are like, I'd like to get into financial journalism have now been dragooned into like sitting at the table next to this guy's surreptitiously recording him and trying to look inconspicuous. We didn't have to persuade them too hard. I mean, this is the thing, the fun thing, I mean, we're like, we can play it being spies as well. Yeah.

I mean, so to explain what was going on to my boss, Paul Murphy, like old school editor, I worked with him the whole time and all these stories. And he has all these like bandit sources, basically sort of rich old men who like to pump the market all the time. He's having lunch with one of them and they go, that wire cut, you know, they'll pay you good money. He's like, what are you talking about? Shut up.

He's like, no, no, no, seriously, go talk to that guy. I've heard $10 million mentioned. And so he goes and has a chat to him and it's like, yeah, maybe there might be $10 million on the table, which by the way is completely insane. Like nobody's ever offered us $10 million to make a story go away. Yeah. I mean, for anything. I like, who can't you buy for $10 million, right?

Well, clearly you guys. I mean, $11 million we might be talking. You do have that debate though, right? You're like, $10 million really? No. But, but they, but yeah, so we get our colleagues with a little camera inside a handbag sort of dressed up as ladies who lunch who just sort of slide into the restaurant next to him and sort of point the camera at Jan Marsalak.

He's like, well, I have no, I have no further questions because nice of these women is a shake. I would not be falling for that one. And it's four times my big Sam Aladise. But then he seems to suspect something is up and so does reverse tradecraft back and it being as difficult to catch because that's a point in the, in the is for real, unconnected shake walked into the restaurant and blew the whole operation. Yeah.

This is, this is sort of less safty brothers and more sort of middling Le Carré novel, I think at this point. Yeah. So I think like this is, these are some of the people that we are, we are dealing with this cast of extreme eccentric characters. And I think one of the things that makes it so interesting is that these quite sort of singular captivating weirdos are set against this because it's not just Jan Marsalak like Oliver Bellenhouse is also getting involved.

A man who wants to take him home to meet your mom, don't you? A man who I can only describe as acts out the plot of death proof to anyone who gets in his car. Hold up. What? Yeah. If Oliver Bellenhouse picks you up from the airport, he'd be like, okay, so do you want to go fast and then like puts on a racing helmet and you'd have the ride of your life?

Wow. And these are also all guys who essentially anytime you'd walk by them in the office, they're all sort of just sitting so slumped so low in their seats, they're on their necks playing call of duty. Wait, hang on a minute. If someone picks me up in their car and says, do you want to go fast? This is the autobahn and then they put on a racing helmet, but don't give me one. I would have a lot of questions.

Why do you need an helmet? Eggshell skull syndrome. I'm very susceptible to all these guys. These are sort of larger than life characters and there are dozens of them throughout the book. One of them that I enjoyed was the guy in charge of Senjo, Henry O'Sullivan, this guy in Singapore who's got a triple penthouse with what is it a multi-story hammerhead shark tank?

Yes, he has a hammerhead shark tank in his house. This is a bum. I'm sorry, but that his main thing is just like eating, eating big enough steaks at Spago every day to give yourself gout by the age of 40 and that, but all of these guys, the business they're in is probably famously one of the most boring. It's just payments. It's barely payments processing. It's a lot of his just third party payments acquiring.

This is not a particularly sexy business. It's an emails job, but maybe that's why. Maybe that's why you want to get the hammerhead shark aquarium. Let's just say I'm in the poodle shaving business. I'm going to read from your book a second because I think this sums up the environment into which not Wirecard was born because it's a company of decades ago, but the environment into which it became this, the main thing about the German economy for a while. It says, there was something in the air and a whiff of optimism.

Marcus Brown, the CEO of Wirecard, as utopianism was becoming the default pose of every executive who could claim their business, use technology. Companies were no longer merely serving customers in the hope of a buck, but they were disruptors reshaping society. Everything was up for grabs and no industry was safe from reimagination. The sums available to startups have been transformed. Private companies valued at a billion dollars were now unicorns and chasing these creatures was an industry.

SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate, announced the launch of the Vision Fund to throw at private companies like Uber or WeWork with their fantasies of world domination. And I mean, I just feel like this euphoria of the weirdly the business euphoria of the post-financial crash age was allowed all of these insane flim flams to just proliferate and become enormous like, for example, WeWork. Like that's a really easy comparator here of what is the WeWork? It's a commercial landlord. And yet it has these grand dreams and bizarre characters that populate it and then turned

out to be nothing. Same thing with Wirecard. What is it? It's a payments processor, but it's the payments processor that's going to transform the world. And actually, this is where I want to talk about Marcus Brown a little bit, because this is a guy who seems to think of himself as Steve Jobs. But does he know that his company did nothing? How in on it was he?

I mean, so you've got to be a bit of an idiot, right? If you put on the Steve Jobs polo-neck and you strut around on the stage going, yeah, so I'm a billionaire. What does he say? I'm a pathological optimist. That's what you're going to say, a pathological billionaire. It's coded into my psyche. Aren't they all?

So this is actually some quotes from Brown in here, or in fact, some quotes from the inspirational posters he liked to hang around. Again, while the company was just a bunch of guys kind of pretending to work or playing Call of Duty, even in its legitimate business days, he liked to talk about things like modern payment, both today and in the past, means one thing, communication. I mean, it makes no sense whatsoever, does it? In the game of football, there's one quarterback and that's the prime minister. Your interview with Brown as well, it sort of starts the same way.

You're saying, I think your company might be completely full of shit. And he does the same thing where he just does the inspirational management speak until he felt for quite some time, in fact. Oh, it goes on for a long time. I don't put it all in the book. It's just a little flavor of the sort of 20 minute recitation of what is it like? Payment is the data carrier. And I did a meaningless management guff like that.

I have a dream, which is that the company will not be judged by the contents of its balance sheet, but by how many Nazi zombies it has deterred it. So this is this is just terribly, terribly odd. But let's let's go through a little bit, right, of of the history, right, of Wirecard. And before we go through that, I have another little slice of life vignette that I think really sums up the entire Wirecard story for me. It's not big. It's not flashy, but it's probably one of the hardest times I laughed in the book.

And I'm going to read it out now. Martin Osterlo was a salesman who was in Manila for the Asian Internet Gaming Conference, because again, before Wirecard did fraud, it did high risk semi-legal processing, which is also worth talking about, because it's a real beneficiary of the war on terror, which is odd. But so this is what he says, in search of new business, ever cost conscious, the Wirecard team had a stand set up at the conference, but decided to only purchase one admission ticket.

Security was light. So what they did was they passed the ticket to the next man over the low fence around the event under a piece of paper. How much money was this company worth again? At this point, hundreds of millions. It's so good to have we got a bunch of guys to stand on each other's shoulders under a trench coat. Because you can't get you can as much as flashy as the Germans are.

You'll never get them to stop pinching pennies in stupid ways. This man doesn't need a ticket. As you can clearly see, he has a hammerhead shock. No, this is just all of them pretending to be under 16. Wait, at the Manila Asian Internet Gaming Conference. I assume they have like concessions. They were soon over 65. I'm a war veteran.

Do not ask for me. I was student is my annual has cost. They were soon busted by an organizer walking the floor who noted that they only had one badge between the three of them. So he was given a don't do it again. How do three adult men not have a sink, not have more than one ticket to this event between them? So this is that's the that's the that's the punchline.

Get ready for the tag. Get ready for the prestige. Osterlo was then given the don't do it again speech and then bought the other two passes before he turned around and saw 12 more wire card guys just eating all the free food. Perfect. To me, that is so perfectly wire card. There is guys of raccoons.

They're raccoons. They're not the likes little animals that like burrow into your. Conditioning dogs. So it's just like they've just they've bought they have enough money to do whatever they want. There are 17 of them there. Not all of them know where all the other ones are. Everyone is surprised by the number of wire card guys.

None of them have got passes and they're just absolutely gorging themselves on the free food. Is that approximately accurate? I mean, that's that's pretty close. Yeah, that's it. This is this is the best company of all time. I think we should bring it back. I think we were too hard on wire card guys got into the buffet and he just

go in there as much as food scattered around. They're all like washing it with the little hands before they eat. So let's talk about this, right? So step one is Chris Bauer and Larry Flint have a plain conversation. And Chris Bauer says, I'm going to get into the porn business, but I'm I'm not going to distribute hustler because I see that that's on the way out. I'm going to take payments for a wide variety of sites, right? Yeah, except it's Paul Bauer at the start.

There's a confusing thing like the first guy is Paul Bauer is easy pay and Manila Paul Bauer is the first Chris Bauer was one of the 12 who's they're ticking into lunch. He looks like an Asian sex tourist, basically. Looks like so. He's dead. Dead. Sorry.

Yeah, absolutely. So basically, so this is where we start, right? They make good money doing that, but they decide they want to grow. How do they then get into wire car? So they so they basically wire cut has just gone bust on the other side of town. Yeah. So Paul Bauer's business growing really quickly. And what happened inside wire card was they hired Jan Marseilleck as their

tech genius. Amazing. And they start to get a little bit suspicious when, you know, one day they come in and all the IT systems have stopped working and they're going, what's happened, what, why has our company fallen over? Why does this not work? And they trace it that like suddenly Jan has plugged all of the company's traffic into his own machine on his desk, not like the dedicated servers.

It's like, oh, you seem to be rooting. Everybody's passwords and everything through your own computer, but he's too important to get fired at this point because he's working on the big project. Yeah, of course. Wirecard 2.0. All right. So like the new software they're going to use it. Two wire two cards.

And so after this is boss is paying real attention to him. It's like, okay, we're going to talk every week. You're going to tell me everything you're doing. It's like, yeah, everything's going great. And so he tells him all the software is ready. Everyone starts selling it. They're like about to roll it out. And the software, the idea is it's like we've applied technology to

payment processing and made it better somehow. Yeah, they're going to be, it's just like better, faster, more secure, you know. Our tagline, don't worry about it. He's about to go seven. And, and his boss, the original CEO is like, this is great. Can I see it? And Jan's like, ah, actually, no, no, not yet. He's like, no, no, really, I, I really want to see this now.

You know, getting a bit suspicious. And he's like, no, it's not quite ready to look at. Well, you know, just give me another week or so. And he like presses him and he's like backing him out the door. And they get sort of halfway down the stairs to like where Jan works. And he's like, yeah, it doesn't work. I've got nothing. A revolutionary payments processor, which is much cheaper than all the previous

ones, localized entirely inside your computer. May I see it? No. But that's the other funny thing, right? Is that the technology, with the exception of like just increasing security by enforcing stuff like PCI DSS rules, the technology for payments acquiring, don't try to make me wrong, hasn't actually really ever changed that much once it went online.

I mean, I've got no idea what those letters you just said. Oh, sorry. But yeah, sure. So it's the security standard for storing card credentials online. But like much of it is much of the actual thing is just we're going to communicate. There is a payments acquirer we're going to communicate to. And then they are going to handle the infrastructure of moving the money from X to Y and they're going to take a commission for doing it.

Yeah. Like, how do you disrupt that? How do you disrupt that? Well, initially by processing the payments of things that are more legally, morally, ethically, societally dubious. So essentially, wire card is in a difficult spot, largely because they hired Jan Marseilleck, a man, the world's most truthful man, who to redesign their system.

And then after that, wouldn't you know it, they'd get into some trouble. So the company is basically in crisis. Like Jan, I mean, he's basically 20 years old at this point. Okay, fine. If you get like a 20 year old guy to single-handedly rebuild your entire thing and start selling it before ever looking at it, you deserve to go out of business. So what they do is they bring in another Austrian who's 10 years older and works at KPMG as a management consultant.

Who's I do never get wrong. Wait, this is the Armando you knew she sketched out. I was like, well, what do other people do when they get in this kind of trouble? Well, they bring in management consultants. That's literally it. And the guy who walks through the door is Marcus Brown. Uh-huh, okay. And then Marcus Brown, like he stays on at Wirecard.

And but ultimately, they don't turn the business around. And instead, it gets bought by Paul Bauer's porn company. Yeah, Marcus Brown comes in, takes over and the company dies and goes bust. Which never happened again to a company that Marcus Brown led, I assume. And so essentially, and this is again, another thing you write, Wirecard quickly became the most valuable part of EBS, Paul Bauer's company, due to its ability to process debit and credit card transactions. Because before they were just, I believe, taking payments from a phone bill, right?

So they did access websites like, for example, and you quote, assholes and armpits. I mean, that's my favorite Morning Zoo radio show. You're listening to Armpit and the asshole. So basically, the message from the new company to the employees, as you say in the book, was simple, chasing reputable blue chip companies was out. One of the old Wirecard heads went from pitching Sony and Brussels to sitting at a Formica table in someone's kitchen dealing with the proprietor of websites dedicated to, as you say, assholes and armpits.

Spunk loving slots. Exactly. There's a big list of them. And so that's a great business, right? Absolutely. There are a lot of people who like armpits and assholes out there. And a lot of banks, especially in Austria, and in the world of, in the world of payments acquiring, there's no bigger risk than the charge back, right?

And in our moralizing age, it's very easy to become the sort of payment processor of last resort for armpits and assholes, right? So when your Wirecard, your business, again, as I understand it, is set up to be like, we're going to engage in these high risk industries, whether they're heavily regulated or have frequent charge backs. So someone would say, you've signed up for armpits and assholes. You think it's $5 for your first month, then $70 for every subsequent month. You say, this is ridiculous.

I'm not paying you. And then the payment acquirer is on the hook for that $70. You've experienced a chargeback, you've lost money. And Wirecard's business is, we're just going to go for all of these high risk payment or Wirecard, as it is now when EBS took it over, their business model was we're going for all the highest risk stuff, because we're going to get all of it under our umbrella and charge a bomb for it. Is that about right?

And they made a ton of money. This is the era of online poker, you know, when suddenly it was the first big success story after porn on the internet, where you could just go join a tournament, become a millionaire. And like all of a sudden, everyone you know is playing online poker. Yeah. And what's very, and this is sort of where Wirecard goes from legal, but high risk to of questionable legality is when they get super, super high

risk, also high risk, where they get into processing gaming payments. Because as you, again, as you say in the book, what happens is in a piece of war on terror legislation to protect, report security in America, some senator just sneaks in a little thing, making online gambling illegal. Yeah. Everybody wakes up one morning and goes, Oh, our business is illegal now. That's not good. And what the United States, I've always said, is such a functional country.

It works so well. And Wirecard, which just recently purchased a bank called XCOM. It just bought the video game XCOM. No, so they lose about four or five tellers a month. We have turns this is a video game legally into an bank. So what they've done though is they've said that where there's this enormous market for online gaming in America, but no one in America can process the payments.

And so what Wirecard does, and again, it's that you'll have a merchant ID. So if you're a gambling company, you have an account with your payments account with your bank to accept payments. And then part of that is you say, what kind of business are you in? If you're in gambling, you put in the little number that says gambling. You put in a different number. They'll usually find out and stop the payment as Wirecard found out. Sometimes they don't much to their profit.

So what they did is their whole business is basically just for a while was circumventing this American law, right? Yeah. And they came up with clever ways to do it where they're like, oh, no, no, I'm not giving money to this poker company. I've got a wallet here. I'm just going to put money into my online wallet. And you know, who knows, I might spend it somewhere later.

Don't worry about it. And then that wallet is at the poker company. Yeah, of course. Or you're, oh, no, I'm just going to the florist or I'm buying some golf balls. And actually the money is going for poker. Yeah. And golf balls is I can then gamble. And so but a lot of the actual structure that they use to circumvent this

law is very, very strange. For example, they created something that you prefer to as a paperwork factory out of a pub in Durham, where they basically got everyone who is at this pub in Durham for 50 pounds of pop to just start companies that were going to be used to own these gambling wallets. And Keir Starmer was there having a beer and a calmer. Yeah. And so you're going to talk a little bit about the, the paperwork factories.

So it's in this little town called Concert up in County Durham. And they literally found guys in the pub and they would say, here's 50 quid, sign your name here. And yeah, if any post comes for us, just pass it on. And so there were thousands of these shell companies all in the UK, but all of them were owned by someone in the British Virgin Islands. And it was just this like, yeah, the money went here and then went off to the Virgin Islands and then off to the gambling site or whatever else or the

nutraceuticals. Oh yeah. And one of my favorite elements, because one of my favorite parts of, and of this story in the Greensill story is how at some point it hinges all on just one guy. And in this case, as I, as I believe it, this is a one guy who, a German living in Florida called Michael Schutt, who was busted by the FBI for mailing more than $70 million worth of wirecard bank checks to US gamblers.

I've always said, I want to have one of the like, Cinecure jobs in a fraud. I've always wanted to be the guy whose only job is to like mail a check or go to the bank once a year and I get paid 15 trillion quid an hour to do it. What is the charge? Using the post, using the American post. And so, but it's getting arrested, getting like tackled to the ground by the IRS's SWAT team because of my job or I just go to the bank.

That's perfect. And I hand off my penis. So what's really funny, right? Is that like Michael Schutt goes down in 2010. That's when that happened. And they still were around for another fucking decade after that. How do you? Because the thing is after the is here's what I understand this, right?

After the financial crisis, a lot of their business starts to drain away. It either gets stolen by people that leave the company or then take the clients with them or then there are like just fewer people with money to spend. And then Jan Marcelek is like the only one who's stupid enough to say, I have a plan where we will guarantee 20% increases in profit every year. How like, how did they not go down right then? Well, I mean, they really should have done like the reason that anyone been paying attention. They're, you know, they're at this moment where you're like, shit, our business is screwed.

We re like, how are we going to find the growth? And this is the moment that this guy who I think the Atlantic called him the dark lord of the internet walks into his life. And he's the Akai Berry guy. Oh, yes. So like there was this period in internet life and like the late noughties when every spam, every like weird little advert you saw online was rule for like Akai berries. Well, they enlarge your pasturiness, of course.

And he had like all of these different brands and the game was get someone's credit card and then just start charging them everything you can in the small print. Cassini's got it just like, yeah, just keep sending them the Akai berries. Basically make it impossible to quit. Yeah, you just like ignore them when they ask you to quit or like just refuse. And in the game, basically keeping them in a prison of antioxidants. But none of them have got cancer. I mean, many of them went bankrupt.

They're so healthy. The healthiest prison. Please go on. So and so this guy walks up and he's like, hey, we've got this great business. We can send you loads of premium processing. And and he does. He'd like he like he flips a switch in this fire hose of money. Starts pouring into work.

I can't mail as many checks. He's in jail at this point. He's just receiving mail. And that works for literally like two months. And it turns out that this guy has been doing it for four years. And he's basically been going from sort of bank to bank. And Visa has finally started to wake up and go, hang on a second. There's something bad going on here.

We should really stop this. So you just have four years of just like being in the Chuck E. Cheese money tube to grab as much as you can before Visa like looks at its own ballot, like its own numbers. He took four hundred million dollars like off of innocent suckers, off of millions of people. Yeah. And and so Yang gets him right at the end where they're like, they get the last hurrah and then Visa comes down with a hammer and is like, stop, stop what you're

doing and they freeze Wirecard's business. The Visa SWAT team. And a visa hire those nice guys from Crawl. The Visa SWAT team had to actually briefly become technically Muslim to deal with a payments processor in Mecca. So it was that's not the first time that Crawl appears in the story. They're back a few more times. I'm like, if Nick Crawl from that show, Big Booth, same Crawl, same guy.

That's his son. The son of the guy who started Crawl. Yeah. Pledge your allegiance to Crawl. Yeah. So but it's so that yeah, it's like they get this two month respite where it's like, oh, everything's going to be great again. We've turned on the money hose again.

We're geniuses again. Thank goodness. But again, yeah, Visa brings the hammer down and is like, no, fuck you. We're freezing. We're getting rid of this guy. We're freezing your business. And again, you're like, OK, now they surely should have died as an operation. But again, they don't.

Yeah, that's it. To the outside world, nothing happened. Why cars and numbers just keep going up and up and up and up 20% growth, 20% growth. Yeah. It's weird how it's the same every year, huh? It's so funny, isn't it? And that's the moment, I think. That's when I reckon they went, we need a new game.

Uh-huh. Because we played by a string. We played by bending the rules more or less since we started. So we played by rules others didn't want to play by at the beginning by engaging in a business that they thought was unsavory. Then we realized that we could make huge amounts of money by bending the rules around gambling and gaming and shell companies and all this. And then after the SIE, Barry thing, they were like, well, wait a minute,

we can just write the num down the number that we have. And then that's how much we have. Um, and this is where I think they start, they stop doing so. And again, we are, there was so much detail that it were glossing over. Like we're glossing over the Wirecard UK and Ireland, for example, which is the whole other bag of hammers, which is basically a company that Yann Marcelette keeps on trying to bully into doing crimes on his behalf, it seems. I mean, that's pretty much it.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, he's the Tony Sophrano. Uh, actually, before we go, can we go into your Wirecard? Why don't you reminisce on me? Can we go into the Wirecard UK and Ireland for just a sec? Cause that's another really interesting one because in, as I understand it, in this time of crisis, they basically hive off this one Irish guy to be like,

okay, you're now Wirecard Ireland. We're, and we're going to propose that you separately from us, you start doing blind payment acquiring and just big blocks from Japan. So you promise basically that a number of customers, you don't know who they are. We're basically doing the reverse KYC. Don't know your client. And what you're going to do is you're just going to process their payments and it could be whatever.

It's probably fine. Is that about the size of it? I mean, that's about it. They get this guy Simon in Dublin to be like, hey, yeah, be our partner. And what we'll do is, you know, all that bad stuff with like the Dark Lord of the Internet that didn't work out. Well, what we want is you to go and find other banks who will do that for us. And then we'll just take a cut of the money.

Yeah. Because when it was all going wrong with the Dark Lord, Jan Marselech starts flying around the world by private jet. And he goes and meets all this other banks going, yeah, we've got a problem. Can you help us? And they like look at him and go, you have your own bank? Why don't you do it there? All my SAE barriers gone.

And so the idea is what he needs is an outside partner who will do all the slightly icky unpleasant stuff for them and then just send Wirecard back a check each month. Yeah. Why send Wirecard the check? Why not just do the stuff yourself? If you had to bring one man out of retirement, who knows how to use the post. It's like mentoring, right? It's a perfect little pyramid scheme.

You just, you have Wirecard Jr. that does all of the stuff that Wirecard used to do. And then when that gets too big, then it gets its own Wirecard Jr. Jr. that does all of the icky stuff. Oh, it's like S Club 7. Oh, so one more thing about the paperwork 7 is it handled a lot of illegal transactions. One other thing I want to talk about about the paperwork factory before we go on to the various Asia businesses is the fact that you knew that the one guy who was like the ringleader of the

paperwork factory who like corralled all his friends from the pub and just starting all these companies, a guy called a Dawson. He was also a regular site around Wirecard's Grasp Bruin HQ, frequently just playing Call of Duty with Oliver Bellenhouse. I mean, that's what you do in like fast moving tech companies. You lounge around on sofas and like play video games. I mean, that's how you conquer the world. Absolutely.

So you're telling me based on which Call of Duty it was, there was a decent chance that I have been killed in Call of Duty on like shipment by a guy who was incidentally running a gigantic wire fraud scheme. Yeah. I mean, Oliver Bellenhouse was pretty good at that, I think. Yeah. He seems most of what he does is just tool around in his car and play card. So what we have, right, is we have this, right?

And now we have Jan Marselech, who's reinvented himself from the tech genius to the globetrotting James Bond businessman. And I have a quote here that I think is very illustrative. Asked when he found time to sleep, Marselech replied to the very macho quote, in the air, he was a member of the Lufthansa top tier honor circle and claimed to fly more miles than the average cabin crew. He's on the Lufthansa honor roll, best paved passengers. And this is one of my favorite lines in the book.

He'd arrive at the airport with his carry-on straight from the flight and a copy of either Sun Sue's The Art of War or a book on the investing genius of Warren Buffett under his arm. Yes. Then, however, the two weeks of Oktoberfest were a grinding marathon of champagne consumption, where he'd wear later hose into the office ready for the next night of client schmoozing. Why would you need to wear later hose into schmooze clients? That's probably my number one question about that. This is Southern Germany, my friend.

Applying the lessons of the art of war to my time on the vision. Yeah. Okay, let's see. Attack your enemy where he's weak, not where you're strong. Okay. All right, everybody. We're going to go have 13 beers. Half-kits.

But when you are near a piff, wealthy, when you are far a piff, fraudulent. And this is like, so this is just another place where like Marcel X, personality seems to really evolve with the business, right? How he presents himself seems to evolve with the business. Yeah, he goes from being like this sort of cool kid who's like the tech guy, you know, white t-shirts, jeans, like super friendly with everyone too. Suddenly, he's flying around in like ketone shirts, which are like a thousand euros a go. And he starts like his lifestyle changes as well.

And he's dropping bottles of wine, $1,000 here, $1,000 there. But he's not one of those guys who like likes the wine. I don't think, I mean, he likes drinking the wine, but it's all about the price and the brand. And he does this thing where like- He got on so well with Russian mercenaries. He had no regard for the microclimate. But the thing is, he always pays cash. Like he's literally running a payments business.

I don't want to give any money to those other clowns. He's like a drug dealer. No, no, a payment processing never touches the stuff. Seriously, it's fucked up. You never know where the money is going. And what he does is, you know, that moment when you're at the table and there's some very expensive wine and stuff going on and you're like, this guy's paying right. This guy is paying.

You know, that moment of uncertainty is the bill arrives. And the less Yan likes you, the more he would let you dangle in that moment before he would like sweeping and be like, oh, well, would it be, would it be terribly bad if I took care of this? Pulls out like a huge wad of notes. Because now that we're- Reaches into the crotch of his laid-offs and pulls out a roll of 50 euro notes soaked in bullswear. So we've got, because one of the interesting things, right, is that

the further we get away from wire car being a legitimate business, the more Yan Marsilek presents as the genius globetrotting businessman, you know, which is interesting. Yeah, as soon as you meet him, he's like- He's at the conferences. He's flying around the world. He's doing deals. And he starts to talk about like his extracurricular activities.

And he's like, oh, yeah. Yeah, no, so I have an interest in some cement plants and Libya. Yeah, a gross cement plant. Yeah. That's where cement comes from. But this is also part of feeling like an international man of mystery as well, right? Yeah. And I mean, it's really hard to say, isn't it?

Because like there's a moment where some of my boss, Paul Murphy, is like trying to get to know him and is using him as a source. And he's like, yeah, we're trying to explore like farmer security, because we hear all these Russians are flying in and no one's checking anything. And he's like, oh, well, yeah, if you can get someone to Moscow, I'll just put him on a private jet and have him fly in for you. And you're like, wait, what? Hang on a second.

And he starts to do these things where he's like, he's starting to play in politics. And there's a moment where like we get sent this email, which is leaked between him. And it's a former CIA agent, a former US ambassador. And they're discussing, they want these guys advice because they're trying to move the Austrian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. What like secretly undercover at night?

They're gonna pick it up and throw it up all in over it and be like, no one will ever know. Unfortunately, this exposes the basement of the Austrian embassy, which they left behind, causing much embarrassment. It's because they're all these guys, like they're all heavily tied up with Sebastian Kurtz as well, right? Yeah, it's all like he's well in with all the sort of the right wing, the FPO, the really nasty guys. Sebastian Kurtz is Sebastian Kurtz, German Wario.

That's right. I mean, in more ways than one. But like they're, so he gets all of these other entanglements, right? And especially like in the pretensions of, and either what either pretensions of being in politics or again actually being in politics as a money man as kind of a steerer of things behind the scene. Yeah.

And there's, and again, he's trying to portray himself as super connected to all these guys. Like there's a Munich security conference and he'd be organizing fancy dinners around that with a bunch of, you know, sort of retired generals. The Munich security conference after party. And then he's doing the scheme where he's like, yeah, what I want to do is I want to set up,

you know, humanitarian ways to combat migration flows in Libya. And we can use my cement plants and we'll use our logistics and stuff. And so he brings these guys in to do it. And on one side, he suddenly got like a former guy from Austrian intelligence helping him. Which basically means Russian intelligence. Well, no. So he, and then an active Brigadier in the Austrian army.

And then they're like, oh, hang on. So what happens when we actually get to Libya? We're going to need some security. And he's like, oh, yeah. Well, there's Jan's other friend, the Colonel in the GRU. Ah. And usually those guys don't see each other, except when they're at work. It's like seeing a teacher outside of school.

Ah, Tavanishpalkovnik. I mean, GRU, Colonel who I've not met before. Absolutely. And so they, like what, does anything ever become of these hair brain schemes? So this is the crazy thing because on the one hand, you've got Jan like facilitating all this. And he's got all these friends and they're all doing it. And he, there's this meeting where he's talking about,

oh, yeah. I've seen this amazing body cam footage from the guys. And it's like mercenaries in Libya doing some pretty unpleasant things. Like, isn't it brilliant? We could never show it publicly. Mercenaries wearing body cams is such an interesting energy to me. As like, who are they accountable to? Oh, it's for a live leak.

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. It's going on my TikTok. Kind of, yeah. It's for Jan Marcelek and guys like Jan Marcelek. Or guys like Jan Marcelek pretends to be. Yeah. So, so on one hand, Marcelek is in this world.

He's like the spy guy. He's organizing all of this. And then on the other hand, he never pays them. That seems very stupid to not pay the people who are very good at stealing. Skipping the page of the arse of war about paying your mercenaries. It's one of the great tragedies. We're like, we're poised for this moment where Jan is about to try and set up a Libyan border force.

And then literally, they stop the whole project and have to have this emergency meeting because he's like, Jan, seriously, why haven't you paid us anything? Unbelievable. This is a lot of where I get the Scorsese plot directed by the Safty Brothers thing, because it just seems like he's bouncing from thing to thing, sort of always having a lot of cash in his pocket,

but never really being able to kind of accomplish anything because he's so torn in every direction by all of his interlacing lies. Well, it's just literally the fucking the war dogs thing where they would have been richer than God with their scam to supply all the illegal Chinese weapons to the US government for the Afghan government. And they didn't get away with it because they forgot to pay the Albanian guy $100,000 to pack it into boxes.

And he just shopped the whole thing to the US State Department. That's sort of where I get the energy of it. But I want to go on through to the Asian operations because I see we've been going for a while, but I... Much like Wirecard to our surprise. To be honest, I screw the hogs on the stream. I'm getting to the end of the story. So what's happened to...

How they begin inventing the fake money is with this succession of Asian businesses that we only on the podcast before have talked about the very end of, but how did this come to be? So this is the thing. Marslick is improvising every single time. And what it is, is he takes that business that he was trying to bully Simon into in Dublin and he basically goes, you know what, this would be amazing if it really worked.

As it doesn't, let's just set it up anyway and pretend that it works. And that is literally it. That's the kind of wisdom you can only get by reading some too. That's right. So please correct. And so this is it. They literally have like a guy in the Philippines, a guy in Singapore and a guy in Dubai just going, yep, just carrying on pretending

to do business here. This is amazing. It went really well last year. We added another zero. We've absolutely sold this. We've processed this many payments for SIE berries or porn or gaming or whatever, but from these three locations, and we've just, and we've could have said,

how much, what number do you want us to write down to say that you've acquired from us in process? And they'll be like, I don't know, the billion. And they don't even bother changing the names of the customers. They basically get a list of guys who like they used to do business with or like they tried to do business with and it didn't work out. And they're like, ah, just like that. A list of assieberryroobs.com.

I like the idea of just like bursting in on a guy who's shaving a poodle and he panics and just puts it to his ears though. It's a phone. And it's like, ah, yes, another one billion euros of payments. Thank you very much, Mr. Assieberry's guy. Getting, getting wrapped up in the sort of like possible implosion of the German economy because five years earlier, my assholes and armpits habit had become uncontrollable.

And so that, so that it's then, because what they're, what they do basically is these are all third party acquirers who are like, we've got this big box of blind payments. We've acquired tons of them. You don't have to check them. You can acquire them. But the actual technology that wirecard sits on, which is like the payment processor is kind of just not doing much at this point.

They have no technology at all. It's just really basic. He's doing the big tech bro thing of saying, we're using AI to do lots of clever things. Nothing of the sort is happening itself. But so the thing they come up with though, like the really clever simple thing is, in a fraud, the problem is the bank account. Because the auditor's coming and go, so where's all this cash?

And what they do is they go, ah, the cash is held in trust. And it's entirely localized within this Swiss bank vault. And so the idea is basically, it's like you go, yeah, you see that Bentley over there. Yeah, I can, it's not my Bentley, but I can drive it whenever I like. And they're like, oh, can you really? He goes, yeah, yeah, see my friend over there who's sitting on the bonnet of the Bentley. He just waves the keys and they're like, oh, great. Sure, seems fine.

And that's how it worked. They just went, my friend is looking after the money. He'll send it whenever we need it. Yeah. And then EY for years, years and years said, great, perfect. Well, that's how you become one of the like big four, like accountancy, auditing firms is that kind of rigor and that kind of thoroughness, right? I mean, yeah, that is, you know, gold standard auditing.

Yeah, yeah. The good chaps theory of auditing. He showed us the keys. Why would his friend be standing next to the Bentley if he didn't have access to it? It's basically like, what if Andrew Tate ran a payments processor and they were always drinking sparkling water, which to us suggested that they were rich guys because they're not drinking tap water like a poor guy. And so what like, let's say, if it should have started to fall apart sort of between 2008,

2010, right? It didn't because they found out that they could just use these third party subsidiaries to just invent the money and they didn't really process any payments after that or not like not nearly the amount they were saying. We still have it stock price ticking up and up and up forever for a number of reasons, one of which is that the entire German media and government and economy seems hell bent on realizing they've gone all in on this group of chancers. And well, goddamn, they're going to double down too.

Well, I think the thing to realize is Germany doesn't really have tech companies. Like it's got a bunch of like great manufacturers who build amazing cars and one tech company which makes software for like big manufacturers, SAP. Siemens, right? Yeah. And so when Wacar came along, everyone's like, hooray, we've got a tech company at last. This is amazing. And then it became really hard to mentally process the idea that, oh, shit, this is a fake.

And so every time there was evidence, you would go, oh, I think we're in trouble here, guys. Is there another reason? And they'd be like, oh, yeah, that reason is the journalists are corrupt. And you actually... Like Marcus Brown, like part of the reason he was on there was because he was respectful, right? He had his doctorate, which is like more of a big deal in Germany because it means you're like a serious. Oh, yeah, you've got to have a doctor.

Yeah, exactly. And no doctor could ever do anything wrong. And so what we get, right, is that Wacar continues doing this for a little while, and then it starts to shake again sort of towards the end of the 2010s. Some of the audits sort of stop coming back and being so nice. This is partly in no small part because of you. You write reporting on it. Some short sellers, some more rigorous than others of writing reports.

Again, this is why I say you must buy the whole shoals of rocks have been left unturned in this discussion. And it starts to wobble. And as I see it, the guys behind it who were largely the original employees of Wirecard, and we know that you totally forgot to say they ended up... Sorry, zoom back to like the 90s for a sec, where the way they got listed on the stock exchange was by buying a bankrupt listed company and then doing a reverse merger with them.

Oh, yeah, it's basically a spack. They did a spack between the two spack booms, essentially. But it was all these same group of chancellors just sitting around playing Call of Duty and fucking around in this office and pretending to be James Bond, and with the entire German society backing them. And as it begins to wobble, EY finally says, okay, we haven't done any audits for real for about 15 years on this company, but we're finally going to do a real one, and that sends them into a panic.

And then that sends them into a panic, where Ed O'Carniawan is then assigned to go and like make the Philippine fishing hut look like a real payment proc wiring company, right? Yeah, so they reach this point where it's like, we've written a story going, yeah, all their profits are fake. And this is how they're faking them. And here are the documents. And so they go, oh, right, what we'll do is we'll call in KPMG, and do another audit to check everything's all right.

And so at this point, the big thing is, is any of this real? And so KPMG, and EY, and a bunch of like, what via card lawyers all go to Manila. And, okay, and they have a great weekend. And so they go to the office of this lawyer who's like a little bit of a YouTube star. He's got one of those plaques. What? I'm sorry. Yes.

Come on. He has one of those plaques, golden plaques for like 100,000 subscribers. And he does his YouTube channel, which is advice on like family law, and adultery, and divorce, those sorts of things. And so all the wire car guys go up and they go, yeah. So this is the guy who's looking after our 1.9 billion euros. And they have this meeting where he's like, I'm this incredibly famous and powerful guy. And I went to university with a president and she knows everyone respects me.

And they're like, okay, this is a bit weird. And he goes, now we should go and see the banks. Like, okay, fine. This is going to sound. At least we'll get something concrete. And they're right by the financial district. They assume they're just going over there. They go down and they all get into these cars.

And they have two police motorcycle outriders who take them for like a 45 minute drive through the traffic to this little lane with like garages and bike repair shops and you know, dogs running around in this tiny little branch. And they walk in there. They all cram in. They can barely all fit in this bank branch. And they're like, hi, we're here about Wirecard.

Like the guy behind the desk jumps up and he's like, Wirecard. And then he looks at the lawyer who's called Tolentino and he sort of nods at him. And he's like, oh, Wirecard. Yes, of course, Wirecard. And he produces this envelope and he hands the envelope to the lawyer and then the lawyer hands it to the lawyers, hands it to the auditors. And they open up and it's like, yes, Wirecard has 1.1 billion euros

in accounts with this bank. And that one piece of paper. And then they get another one at the other bank. So they have these two pieces of paper, which is basically all the evidence that Wirecard has 1.9 billion euros in cash. So they have these two pieces of paper. And they have like, they were spelling mistakes on them. I'd like...

Bank of Cobrastan. Wirecard. One of them is signed by an assistant branch manager. He's assistant to the manager and you can't expect the manager to take time out of his day for 1.9 billion. You are kind of notionally a multi-billion dollar company. Like, I'm sort of going to go back to something else at the very beginning. Can't you afford to at least make it look like rent a nice office or something?

This is the crazy improvisation, like right at the end, where they're like, we've got to come up with something. Yeah. And they almost did. It almost worked. EY were like, well, it seems weird, but we've got a piece of paper now. I love auditors. We've got a piece of paper which says we weren't wrong the first time.

And we're going to choose to say that piece of paper seems fine. Of course, it's got spelling mistakes. English isn't their first language. It would be colonialists to expect them to be able to spell it right. And so, because the thing is, at this point, we actually have their exit strategy, right? Because they know they can't do this forever. Their exit strategy, I think, as we say is, if our stock price,

if we can get the stock price to 160 euros, despite the short sellers and the FT and everything, then we can buy Deutsche Bank. I mean, it's incredible, isn't it? And we can make all of this stuff, all of these things. In the terms of Deutsche Bank's balance sheet, this is all small potatoes. This is a rounding error.

We can make it all disappear. And you know, it might have worked. It's kind of, if you look at the stock market over, what, the last two years, you can sort of imagine this world where Marcus Brown is the amazing billionaire in the turtleneck, who is reshaping Europe's financial system. And we're going to turn Germany's biggest bank into a technology company. And everyone would just get behind that, right? Oh my God, you know, thinking about this, right?

When did they go, if they just lasted a little bit longer, they would have experienced this sort of, they would have experienced this sort of sectoral tech boom and stuff like payments processing and online shopping. They would have bought Deutsche Bank. We wouldn't be having this conversation. I think they could have gone away with it. It would have been like a, it would have been like a bank job, except you just went inside and take over the bank.

Astonishing. If it wasn't for you meddling kids. So I want to read the very end. This is, this is the, um, uh, Ray Liotta, who by the rest in peace, I found out he died today. Uh, Ray Liotta. Shit. Yeah.

I'm pouring some out. Uh, Harry, Harry Hill is Henry Hill as outside. Henry Hill. Oh, he's wearing his big college shirt. I was like, Henry Hill. No, we're at Wirecard. God damn it. So Henry Hill is standing outside his suburban house talking about egg noodles and ketchup.

This is sort of where we are in the book now. Marcelek was suspended for 12 weeks, but he wasn't even escorted from the premises. He strolled around the top floor at Wirecard headquarters whistling to himself without a care in the world. Before he left, he and Brown had a long and seemingly intense conversation in the CEO's office. One staff member walked in only to turn around again when he saw their faces. But Marcelek finally did leave.

He told friends he intended to go to Manila and sort this mess out himself. I know the money is there. I just need to kick ass. But if anyone must have known the money wasn't there, it would have been him. Exactly. It's weird. It's like this guy was really insistent that he needed to inspect my wallet. And like, I don't know, he seemed so sincere.

But at that point, like the fraud's done, like you're cooked. At that point, like what? Listen, it's in the art of war. You never fucking give up on the fraud. At the end of the day, there's still signs of hope among the investor base, though. The share price closed at 39.90 euros at this point. That night, management recorded a video arranged behind a long, thin island topped in wire car blue.

Brown stood rigid, his fingertips pressed the table in front of him. They had a new chief compliance officer, James Fryce, who was awkwardly introduced in a light summer jacket board for the appearance. Had a new compliance officer. Quailude's a-caster. Brown presented himself as the victim. At present, it cannot be ruled out that wire card has become the aggrieved party in a case of fraud of considerable proportions.

James Fryce looked at the documents and immediately concluded that Wirecard's Philippines money had never existed. After that, events began to accelerate. Excuse me. On Monday, the 22nd of June, Wirecard admitted that the money never existed and finally fired Marsalak, who now hasn't been seen in Munich since everything blew up the previous Thursday. The share price dropped.

Due to being a pile of dismembered limbs buried in the desert. Marcus Brown spent the weekend in Vienna and on Monday returned to Germany to present himself to prosecutors after a warrant was issued for his arrest. Three more days was all the company could stagger. On Thursday, the 25th, Wirecard for the second time ever filed for insolvency. And at that point, it's now just bitter recriminations, arrests, short sellers finally taking profits, having probably actually lost money, and no small amount of people faking their deaths.

The guy in the Philippines who... The other Bauer, Christopher Bauer. Yeah, the other Bauer, Christopher Bauer. Got an infected boil. Oh, no, you don't want those. Yeah, you really don't want an infected boil. A silent killer. And then his family announced that he had suddenly died of this and they had,

within about 10 minutes, cremated him with a very fast funeral with his long lost twin brother, who will be in attendance as well, wearing sunglasses and a big hat. Oh, he had a very Islamic family. We're going serious for a quick burial here. And then in case anyone had missed it, they posted photographs on Facebook of the urn with his name and the date of his death printed on it. Just to really ram home, he is absolutely definitely dead. Like a magician's act.

Now, you and I haven't met before, is that correct? Now, I'm 100% dead, would you agree? Oh, so I got to end on this question. Where do you think Yad Marselech is right now? I think he's outside Moscow in a villa. Probably with a small. Orientation relative to the ground. Is he walking on top of it?

Is he six feet under? What is his altitude? Yeah, he is by the most recent accounts. I mean, anything could have happened in the last little while, but he's been communicating with his lawyer. Oh. And there's been reports in the German press that maybe he'd like to come home. Maybe living in Russia isn't what it used to be.

The Marselech who came in from the cold. The ultimate coder to this episode is Dan's going to walk out of the studio and his limp's going to slowly disappear. Adopt an Austrian accent. We've watched an enjoyable podcast. As if he had been here the whole time. So he realizes that like he's just describing things in the room. That's like a visit manila poster on the wall.

Yeah, absolutely. We've just got a whole wall of like vans, sneakers behind us as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect. Someone that wear with their armpit out and other persons there with their asshole out. Yeah, it's a weird vibe in here. Yeah, well, I think that's probably a pretty good place to end it. So I want to say, Dan, thank you so much for coming on

and letting me read this book. Thank you so much for having me. It's been amazing. Absolutely. We'd like to thank Jan Marselech very much for joining us. That's right. This episode is, of course, in loving memory of Christopher Bauer. He's with the Angels now.

May he rest in peace. That's right. Thank you for listening and being a bonus episode listener. Will the book, if this is going to come out. Thank you for subscribing to On Bits and All Souls. Thank you for paying through Wirecard. Now, when is the book actually out and people will be able to buy it? People can buy the English book on June the 16th.

And I think they can get the German already. Okay, so learn German and then read this book. It is a fantastic piece of writing. I skipped through it in a very short period of time because it's very compelling. So do go and buy Money Men by multiple copies. Use it to read and then to prop up your desk or whatever. Millions of copies through Shell Company in Manila. Absolutely.

So once again, Dan McCrum, thank you so much for coming on. And thank you for all that you did to research Wirecard. And we'll see you all, or I don't think I'll see you for the next free episode because I'll be on holiday. So I'll see you all when I see you. This guy went on a trip to Manila. Bye, everyone.