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Comment by mellutussa | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to listen to a podcast about this.

When I saw "fraud of the century" I thought it was the OneCoin scam (Ruja Ignatova, "The Crypto Queen"). BBC did a very detailed investigative podcast about that one: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/uj5nz-a0b8a/The-Missi...

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I was thinking of Wirecard. There's an awful lot of centry-level financial fraud going around right now.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/how-the-bigges...

Wirecard was €1.9 billion. The cum-ex trading scandal siphoned up to €55 billion. My lawyer went to school with one of the major guys involved.

https://theconversation.com/the-robbery-of-the-century-the-c...

Wirecard's max market cap was $27 billion, which puts it in the ballpark of Enron, which was itself a scale of the century. That is of course an inflated value, both by market cap being inflated, and inflation having occurred between the two events, but wirecard card is worth mentioning - when it broke, who could have imagined that we would have three or four more of these?

Comparing Market cap to fraud amounts isn't really sensible.

The €55 billion was income and you shouldn't usually compare income to market capitalisation. Unless you are comparing against NAV fraud (which is made up numbers so NAV fraud is _somewhat_ meaningless!)

CumEx was my first guess as well. Not some basic run the mill VAT cheating.

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