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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

Notice their signature:

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

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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.

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

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