Wirecard offices searched as prosecutors probe management board | Hacker News Reader

Wirecard offices searched as prosecutors probe management board

www-ft-com.ezproxy.babson.edu

36 pointssamizdis35 comments

There goes one of Germany's few unicorns. They had around 6, depending on who you asked.

Meanwhile the US has around 230. 0.7 unicorns per million people in the US, versus 0.07 per million in Germany.

Why does Germany have more than an order of magnitude fewer? Not to mention that German startups are generally quite lame - their biggest unicorn is Auto1, which is literally just used cars.

That said, I guess there are some wealthier countries doing even worse than Germany, like Italy (their sole unicorn was just 100% fraud.) Still, Germany surprises me.

Well, not that I want to defend German start-ups, really I don't. But WeWork is just office space, so...

Point being, a lot unicorns are just VC pushed marketing machines. And I have no idea why Auto1 even exists...

Edit: Softbank invested in Auto1 as well. I start to see a pattern here...

Oh, I'm in total agreement - a lot of unicorns are just "normal companies" with VC cash behind them. But a lot of unicorns actually do something really cool. SpaceX, DJI, Ginkgo Bioworks, etc. Then there are a bunch that started great but went off course, like Vice and Reddit...

But Germany really perplexes me.

For the first five decades of the prize's existence, Germany literally had the majority (!) of the world's Nobel laureates. Germans invented the computer, modern telecommunication, the x-ray, the printing press... they discovered everything from testosterone to continental drift to nuclear fission!

It's not like innovation stopped since WW2 either (which I see people say occasionally) - just since the 80s they've discovered six (!) elements, created the first genetically modified animal, the SIM card, SMS, MP3, the scanning tunneling microscope...

They have money, they have an educated population - but in this new world of startups they don't seem to be getting anywhere. Why?

I think it comes down to the German attitude towards risk and entrepreneurship. Failure is still seen as a permanent mark on your CV here instead of something that gave you experience. German VCs are risk averse, so they are not taking big chances regularly which could create unicorns. The few newer VCs that think and act more "American" are to small to fund unicorns.

Recent example: a young guy did his PhD, invented couple cool algorithms in video processing area and got Million Euro grant to commercialize the project. The algorithms were cool, but the clients the PhD guy targeted didn’t care about price at all. The guy spent all the money and failed.

Inventing is one thing, commercializing invention - totally different. Population doing inventions has no clue how to make business even with money. Regarding funding, it’s just not there. What is seed stage in Germany, is series A or even B in USA. If founder can bootstrap until series B size, he probably will not take money from outside anymore.

Do you have a link for this story? Sounds interesting. With h.265, VP9, VC1 etc it seems there's demand for better video codecs.

No link, only local stories in Munich. That wasn’t about video codecs, but rather SLAM. They were my direct competition. The clients were not interested in saving couple €, they need stability long term for their installations. I have same problem, so I need to do this part differently.

If you ever find out. Let me know. I’ve been wondering the same for years.

Fun fact: Wirecard is one of the 30 companies included in the DAX, Germany's large cap index.

Why is this downvoted? It appears to be true[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAX#Components

I'd guess because it's already mentioned in the article

Well, I never heard of Dax before and knowing (thanks to the parent comment) that it is formed by only 30 firms adds context to the "prestigious" in the article.

I guess some people really do read the articles. I tend to read the higher voted comments first to get a feel for whether the article is worth reading.

Isn't that the bank N26 used before they got their own license?

Also Monzo

https://monzo.com/blog/2018/01/18/future-of-prepaid

Yes. More info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N26_(bank)#History

Whats up with this strange URL/domain?

Seems to be using a university proxy to get around FT's usual paywall. I had not seen this method before, am somewhat surprised the university proxy doesn't require some kind of SSO/auth. (if it's indeed working the way I surmise.)

To quote from a comment I made in response to a similar query the other day: I've an FT subscription and often post articles, but I try to do a search and find an alternate link - quite a bit of FT content is syndicated fairly quickly to non-paywalled sites. A few days ago, an FT article that I'd posted and then searched for showed up with the OCLC domain [1]. I've been trying to figure out how it all works, but have failed. If you try to hit "baldwinlib.idm.oclc.org", you get a login page.

[1] That was referring to:

https://www-ft-com.baldwinlib.idm.oclc.org/

- it turned up when I'd searched in DDG for an FT article's headline.

Then, maybe yesterday or the day before, a similar search turned up an FT article via:

https://www-ft-com.ezproxy.babson.edu/

Anyhow, it seems to offend some people if links are posted to paywalled sites, and it seems to offend others if one posts a paywalled link and then adds a non-paywalled link in comments. I have, therefore, been experimenting with posting the non-paywalled links via these resources if a search doesn't turn up a syndicated copy of the original article.

I suspect that the university-linked resource sites referenced here will probably close these loopholes pretty sharpish.

If any moderators see this, I would be happy to learn of any HN party line, or preference, about this behaviour. (Guidance welcomed by comment or by email. Thanks.)

Not a mod, but afaik the policy is to always submit the canonical source and share workaround links in the comments (e.g. the FAQ explicitly say that submitting links to paywalled content is fine, as is asking for and sharing workarounds in comments)

Yes, I had read that and abided by it until I noticed that every time I added a comment with a workaround link (rather than to a syndicated copy), the comment would be downvoted - often repeatedly so that it could no longer be seen.

Agree that the official source link is the link to post, which you appear to understand - yet then claim to violate due to the reasoning you described. Once the blocks happen, all the links you posted will be broken, please stop doing this.

A valid point, and thank you for saying please.

No problem, agree with your intent, but appears you understand it more likely than not will result in problems. Thanks!

PS - While it unclear in this situation, other issues with proxies & mini-URLs is that they might easily be used to mine IPs, set cookies, launch attacks, etc.

i'm not familiar with it, so just googled and that is a year ago for example https://www.ft.com/content/d51a012e-1d6f-11e9-b126-46fc3ad87...

"But the account of what happened, in a preliminary report on the investigation by one of Asia’s most eminent legal firms, indicated it was part of a pattern of book-padding across Wirecard’s Asian operations over several years. Documents seen by the Financial Times show two senior executives in the Munich head office had at least some awareness of the round-tripping scheme: Thorsten Holten and Stephan von Erffa, respectively the company’s head of treasury and head of accounting."

Please help me. Maybe this is the right place to ask regarding this: How can I send money to a debit or credit card?

Yes. I do not want to charge the card, not reimburse a charge, no, I want to send money to a credit card or debit card. I need this as a solution for a business.

It can't be so hard. If you ever got your VAT/Sales tax reimbursed in Europe (e.g. via this service provider: https://www.globalblue.com/ ) you know what I mean. It does not require you to have bought the goods with a credit card. They just send you the credit to your card that your provide.

How can I do this?

TabaPay is an option, as is Stripe.

I will look into TabaPay. I contacted stripe and assumed that they would not even reply. They did reply and were very kind but ...We don't offer the functionality to send money to cards the way some other providers do. ...

It sounds like you're looking for an OCT provider. Finix is an option you can pursue.

Payoneer issues pre-paid MasterCard plastic via Wirecard (the UK branch), if I’m not mistaken.

This headline does not come as a surprise to me, given my one interaction with Wirecard.

About a year ago, I had a bad experience with Verizon FIOS so I cancelled my subscription with them. I was owed a refund and Verizon delivered my refund to me on a Wirecard debit card. They claimed it was cheaper to issue a plastic card than to refund me directly to my card or issue a paper check. I find this claim extremely hard to believe. A pre-paid debit card is certainly NOT easier for the customer than a check. There are strong business cases for prepaid debit cards, but this was not one of them.

More likely, by issuing the refund via debit card, Wirecard and Verizon are able to extract every last possible penny by way of debit card fees and people who simply didn't bother to get their money off the debit card, by virtue of the friction they created for the customer with the debit card.

Pretty scummy if you ask me.

>More likely, by issuing the refund via debit card, Wirecard and Verizon are able to extract every last possible penny by way of debit card fees and people who simply didn't bother to get their money off the debit card, by virtue of the friction they created for the customer with the debit card.

In my experience you don't get charged fees if you try to spend the money normally (eg. at a store). There's still the problem of spending every last cent on the card, but supermarkets and gas stations generally allow charging an arbitrary amount to a debit/credit card. I think they even have a free option to transfer the balance to your bank via ACH.

So, to add insult to injury, they require that I provide them with my bank account number and my routing number just to get my refund that could have been simply credited back to the credit card I used to pay them originally or issued via a paper check.

Just what the world needs. More plastic. Because it's "cheaper", and sharing more sensitive information, because they are sooooo trustworthy.

I also got a refund from Verizon as a debit card, and thought about the easiest way to extract every cent of it. My solution was to use the debit card to buy an Amazon.com gift certificate for myself for the exact amount that was on the debit card. Amazon makes it easy to pay for all or part of any transaction using a gift certificate.

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