Wirecard’s Boon is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Wirecard’s Boon is shutting down

beboon.com

35 pointswlkr37 comments

> Why is the boon.Program closing? - Due to the current situation, we've taken the difficult decision to close the boon.Program.

What a bullshit answer. You should better ignore the question altogether than answer it this way.

Yes, it's even worse than the one that goes a bit like this (with "//" denoting a change of voice as audio samples from different recording sessions get combined):

We apologise for the late departure of the // 11:44 // service for // London Kings Cross. // This is due to // the late arrival of an incoming service.

I'm sure passengers appreciate the explanation.

I expect the person who recorded "the late arrival of an incoming service" also recorded a few alternatives, such as "leaves on the line" or "alien abduction", but they never seem to use any of the alternatives.

Maybe they don't do it for National Rail, but I've heard '... due to a person under a train' quite often on the Underground.

My favourite was always, “we apologise for the delay, because the driver is currently on a delayed train”.

At some point the excuse just makes you look even more incompetent, and you’re better off staying silent.

I've noticed airlines started doing this as well - I think there might be logic in it, especially from a terminus. I'd wager people would subconsciously assume the train just "appears" ready for their journey without thinking about knock on effects of the logistics, no matter how illogical it'd be.

I've seen enough irate commuters getting agro with station staff that I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't A/B tested which messages result in the least complaints.

You might be interested in the full list of UK trail delay codes: https://wiki.openraildata.com/index.php/Delay_Attribution_Gu...

Not arguing with your comment, but with "Due to the current situation" they assume that the public is aware that they are a Wirecard AG Brand (well, formally WCS Ltd, as a subsidiary of WC AG), and that Wirecard AG went under a few weeks ago.

That's a very wild assumption to make. I used boon. and didn't know they are a Wirecard brand.

> they assume that the public is aware that they are a Wirecard AG Brand

Or perhaps masking that situation under the COVID situation for those who don't know about Wirecard's involvement?

Notice their signature:

  boon. – a Wirecard brand
  Wirecard Card Solutions Limited
  boon. Service
  Postfach 31 05 44
  04136 Leipzig
  Germany

May not have to do with that. Other WireCard-powered companies are back on track. Most probably they'd be looking to switch, but I own a couple of Wirecard-cards and they're working

You still trust enough to use them?

Not being snarky, just given the way the company has blown up in holiday fireworks fashion, I'd be looking to balance transfer and go to anything else.

Don't stress, your question is very valid. I don't use them per se. I've just got a card from crypto.com — the other card I have that uses WC is Curve

Curve is not my main card, but as for the crypto.com, Wirecard doesn't hold their funds.

Depends what country you’re in. In the UK at least the rules and regs makes it very hard for you to steal customer funds. The money needs to be stored in a segregated account held at a real bank, who is then responsible for making sure that account isn’t abused.

And if you’re bank offering these types of accounts, then you’ll have the regulator watching your every move to make sure you’re not misbehaving.

They're not just Wirecard-powered, they are Wirecard.

Yup. Curve made the switch away pretty well

Regarding that, may I ask slightly off topic, since I probably missed several Wirecard posts on HN: Can anyone explain to me how it is possible to make 1.9 billion Euro disappear, or even somehow account them wrongly in case they never really existed? This seems so incredible to me, given how my bank checks every cent when I do a wire transaction.

Isn't there some constant accounting and auditing when you handle such amounts of money? Shouldn't it be immediately clear to anyone who checks the transactions where the money went and if it was there? And aren't there also electronic safeguards for suspicious transfers and so on?

~2B is peanuts among accounting scandals.

In NL we had our flagship grocery chain inflate the numbers by ~10B in 2003.

Parmalat invented 15 billion euros, between 1990 and 2003, having an annual revenue of 5 billion. Everything started breaking down only when they defaulted on a 150 million dollar bond, despite reporting 4 billion in liquid assets assets.

https://www.econcrises.org/2016/11/29/parmalat/

Yeah there is. Unfortunately checks and balance don’t tend to work very well when the people operating them, are the same as the people committing the fraud.

Eventually it was an external audit that caught them out.

Also the 1.9 billion didn’t really disappear, it never existed in the first place, so there wasn’t really anything to misplace.

we have to inform you that due to the events of the past weeks we will discontinue the service of boon. as of 3rd of October 2020.

What "events of the past weeks" does this refer to?

Boon was/is part of Wirecard, which blew up last month as major fraud came to light; see e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-german-fintech-d... or just google for "Wirecard"

The end of Wirecard.

And later:

"Why is the boon.Program closing?

Due to the current situation, we've taken the difficult decision to close the boon.Program."

They could have just said "because reasons" and been equally informative. Why bother including the text at all?

Boon is part of Wirecard and its pretty well known what happened there and why their companies might stop their service. Based on that, I assume they use wording like this to not affect the current investigations regarding the wirecard situation.

Who?

I always find it kind of endearing when you find out about a product for the first time when they close down.

It’s not the company’s fault someone posted a customer communication on HN.

And it often happens these are awesome, unique products I'd love to use.

Their blog post prior to this one was about the world being shaped by crises.

"So maybe this crisis will usher in a new Era where people will exclusively prefer to shop online? It will be interesting to see the direction in which the world progresses. In any case, boon. Customers are always well prepared for both Online-Shopping and shopping in stores with their boon.App. So whatever there will be: Enjoy Paying!"

They got screwed in the Wirecard scandal. One day to the next nothing worked.

Given that they were part of Wirecard, it's more like they were screwing around themselves instead of getting screwed.

It was probably a small department that ran this startup and quiet possible did not know what was going on at the top although there where always a lot of rumours.

There's no money to be made in payments. The two-sided acquisition fees (merchants + users) plus per-transaction fees just burn cash.

How is that different from any other form of marketplace?

For payments alone, you can't charge enough to cover the credit card transaction fees because no one will pay it. They all try to make it up in volume via a loyalty program or sell the data to others.

Other marketplaces can take a percentage off the top well in excess of the fees, or they'll even add the tx fee on top to fully pass it through.

There is money to be made if user acquisition costs are non existent. Just a billionaire boys club game these days...

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