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Hidden as a orthodox priest! "Then came June 2020, when, in the midst of an audit, Wirecard could not locate €1.9 billion in assets it claimed were being held

Hidden as a orthodox priest! "Then came June 2020, when, in the midst of an audit, Wirecard could not locate €1.9 billion in assets it claimed were being held somewhere in the world" EY audited them for years without asking about the missing billions.

piva00 3y ago
> Hidden as a orthodox priest! A throwback to the ancient world to the Middle Ages, hiding spies among the clergy!
- dralley 3y ago
  Don't have to go back that far - the current Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church is "ex-"KGB
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > the current Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church is "ex-"KGB Seems related: Russia is more frequently arresting religious leaders (all sorts), typically on terrorism charges ref: https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-victims-database/maksim-khalturin https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-v... ref: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/2/ukraine-court-puts-metropolitan-pavlo-under-house-arrest https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/2/ukraine-court-puts-m... ref: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/02/03/russia-jails-islamic-publisher-for-17-years-on-terrorism-charges-a80137 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/02/03/russia-jails-islam... ref: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/world/europe/russia-church-repression-siberia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/world/europe/russia-churc... ref: https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-victims-database/medzhit-abdurakhmanov https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-v... 2000's sidebar: It killed me watching Russia overtly copy the US model of boogey-manning terrorism into an flexible excuse to expand State reach and power
    - dralley 3y ago
      er, copy? The first and second Chechen wars happened in the 1990s.
    - mandevil 3y ago
      In September 1999 a series of bombs tore apart four apartment buildings in three Russian cities, and the recently appointed (a month earlier) Prime Minister, a bright young former deputy mayor of St Petersburg named Vladimir Putin, whom no one had ever heard of and had many similarly positioned rivals, won a great deal of popularity for his handling of these "terrorist attacks" that killed 307 people, including re-invading Chechnya and starting the Second Chechen War. He then used that popularity to become essentially dictator for life. These bombings were blamed on Chechens- who hotly denied it. It has long been suspected- but not really proven- that the FSB was behind it, as a true False Flag operation to gin up support for invading Chechnya, done under the orders of former KGB/FSB agent Vladimir Putin who just happened to be the one to benefit most from the attacks. You can see the wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombing... to see more details on exactly what the evidence for this is, and the people who argue that there is just not enough evidence one way or another to assign responsibility. So, no, Russia was not "overtly copy the US model" if anything they were innovating it first and the US was copying.
      - lazide 3y ago
        [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)] Spanish American war? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident ] Gulf of Tonkin? The tail wagging the dog is as old as, well, government. Probably older. Nothing new under the sun, etc. etc.
- ajuc 3y ago
  Russian Orthodox church today is openly run by russian state officials, military, police, fsb members, etc. They are also openly supporting invasion of Ukraine as a kind of "holy war". The russian word for "non-government organization" is "foreign agent".
  - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
    > The russian word for "non-government organization" is "foreign agent". Thats pretty accurate though.
    - ajuc 3y ago
      It's not, and westerners who think they agree don't actually agree, they are just edgy. It's hard to even explain what it would mean to internalize this belief system. Let me try. We're you ever on an amateur IT conference? Comicon? Some sports event? Would it ever occur to you to assume some government is secretly behind it? When the Jehova witnesses or scientologists knock on your door - which government is financing them to do it and why? After all people don't do things for free.
      - brookst 3y ago
        It’s just the reductive pedantry that’s so popular on the internet. A CIA operative is the agent of a foreign government, therefore a foreign agent. A Doctors Without Borders medic is an agent of a foreign organization, therefore a foreign agent. Therefore CIA and DWB are essentially the same thing. Bonus points if you can find one case where a DWB volunteer also had ties to the CIA, which would totally expose the two orgs as being exactly the same in all ways at all times. For some reason people just can’t resist reductionism.
        fragmede 3y ago
        > For some reason people just can’t resist reductionism. Being a bit reductive there, eh? :)
mellutussa 3y ago
> €1.9 billion in assets it claimed were being held somewhere in the world I really hate it when I leave my billions somewhere in the world and can't remember where.
- endymi0n 3y ago
  [flagged]
- FabHK 3y ago
  There was a personal assistant who stole around GBP 4m from several of her bosses at Goldman Sachs. One of the bankers finally noticed when a 6-figure donation to Harvard bounced. One of other the victims later testified that his investment account felt "one or two million light". https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/secretary-who-had-a-aps4m-talent-for-stealing-from-her-superrich-bosses-56955.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/secretary-who-ha...
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    My friend once stated that "Financial security is when you don't know which day of the week your paycheck gets direct deposited". Imagine being so unfathomably wealthy you don't even know how much cash you should have control over from one day to the next. Actually don't, it's bad for your brain.
    - robocat 3y ago
      > unfathomably wealthy It's all just relative. I've mislaid thousands. That's years of income in many countries. You don't need to be that wealthy before a days wages for you is a months wages for someone poor in many countries. Indecently wealthy is relative: people look at their own incomes and often compare upwards but rarely seem to compare downwards.
  - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
    Don't you just hate it when you can't recall if you were supposed to have 1 or 2 million on your investment account?
jgalt212 3y ago
If you pay the Big 4 enough money, they will look the other way or not ask for supporting documentation. Just google accounting scandals and see just how many of these shops were audited by the Big 4.
- toyg 3y ago
  Any tax authority worth their budget should require extra evidence from any Big-4 customer. By now it's clear they are less reliable than your average smalltown accountant. Unfortunately, there is typically a big revolving door between them and any tax institution. Why toil for decades in underpaid public roles, when you can step into the gilded world of consultancy and double or treble your salary? It's like the yacht scene in The Wolf of Wall Street, except in real life most civil servants take the corrupting deal (and I can't even blame them).
  - hef19898 3y ago
    The audits done by the Big 5 in this context have nothing to do with taxes so.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    Lol, if audits had to do with taxes and not defrauding investors, this would have made sense.
- brookst 3y ago
  It really depends on the terms of the audit. Routine financial audits are not intended to be exhaustive forensic audits that assume every document might be forged as part of a massive fraud. Most audits are just “does the documentation support the reporting”.
- cortesoft 3y ago
  Isn’t that just because most of the biggest companies are audited by the Big 4, and in order to be a big accounting scandal, you need to be a big company? I feel like this is pointing out something like, “More criminals drive Ford trucks than any other truck” which is true, but just because more people drive that brand than any other? Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
hef19898 3y ago
EY believed the documents shown to them. Sloppy for sure, and EY got their amount of flak for it. People litteraly went to the banks in Asia during the extraordinary audit, something that is not usually done during "normal" audits. And yes, I also hate when I misplace my billions. Especially since I have yet to relocate them...
- omega3 3y ago
  > EY believed the documents shown to them. Sloppy for sure, and EY got their amount of flak for it. There are strict rules and guidelines around verifying an asset. The auditor isn't supposed to "believe the documents" - they need to form an independent opinion.^1 If the auditor is unable to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence to verify the asset, they can issue a qualified opinion due to a scope limitation. ^1 https://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/member/discover/cpd-articles/audit-assurance/specific-considerations.html https://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/member/discover/cpd-article...
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Good nitpick. Thing is, the proof EY got from Wirecard was good enough to meet these thresholds, at least I never read or heard anything else. All that evidence was fabricated, of course. What EY did was ignoring all the warning signs they had: money laundering, making up business, fraud and all that. EY also wanted the proof the standards it seemingly met, that was the failure. But then those audits are not really meant to find organized fraud at a company to begin with.
    - omega3 3y ago
      > Thing is, the proof EY got from Wirecard was good enough to meet these thresholds It objectively wasn't. I've never heard of a case where the auditor doesn't independently verify the bank account balance with the bank itself. More reliable evidence reduces the need for additional corroborating evidence. In general the evidence obtained from the company itself wouldn't be considered reliable by itself. https://www.ft.com/content/db9fa3d7-11da-476e-beea-d5ed0ad137ed https://www.ft.com/content/db9fa3d7-11da-476e-beea-d5ed0ad13... This wasn't some hard to uncover marvel of accounting fraud using complex financial engineering.
rchaud 3y ago
EY offices in Singapore knew that their revenues were not traceable (Wirecard invented clients based in Asia). They hired a law firm to investigate, but the head office in Europe suppressed the findings because they wanted the contract.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Did this come up during the EY trials? Because this is the forat time I ever heard that.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Beijinger 3y ago
No, they did ask. And got Bank statements. They even went to a subsidiary branch of the bank and confirmed that the money exits in Indonesia (or was it the Philippines?). The problem: This bank had no branch in Singapore (or wherever it was). He set up a fake branch with actors that showed EY computer statements - EY took pictures of the screens - with the balance. You can't make this up. EY screwed up, but they could not have reasonably assumed that someone sets up a fake bank branch.
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  Yes I know they did ask. As the responsible manager for IT (usually CTO - internal SOX was a different matter) I have been "asked" by EY (and KPMG) about IT setups and security several times for audits. And I could have told them whatever I like, the people were right out of university with no clue about the matter and in no position to ask the right questions except reading their checklist; I always had the impression they only knew half the words they were reading.
  - 19h 3y ago
    Did you remove Wirecard from your LinkedIn?
    - alsetmusic 3y ago
      > Did you remove Wirecard from your LinkedIn? [Not the person you replied to.] Did the person you replied to work for LinkedIn? What's the context for this question?
      - 19h 3y ago
        I was just curious and visited the LinkedIn profile that's linked to from the ctone.ws website (in KingOfCoders's profile) and was wondering why Wirecard was omitted.
        bitcharmer 3y ago
Log_out_ 3y ago
Well, Russian orthodox church was always cheka all the way from the top?

piva00 3y ago

> Hidden as a orthodox priest! A throwback to the ancient world to the Middle Ages, hiding spies among the clergy!

dralley 3y ago
Don't have to go back that far - the current Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church is "ex-"KGB
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > the current Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church is "ex-"KGB Seems related: Russia is more frequently arresting religious leaders (all sorts), typically on terrorism charges ref: https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-victims-database/maksim-khalturin https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-v... ref: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/2/ukraine-court-puts-metropolitan-pavlo-under-house-arrest https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/2/ukraine-court-puts-m... ref: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/02/03/russia-jails-islamic-publisher-for-17-years-on-terrorism-charges-a80137 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/02/03/russia-jails-islam... ref: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/world/europe/russia-church-repression-siberia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/world/europe/russia-churc... ref: https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-victims-database/medzhit-abdurakhmanov https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-v... 2000's sidebar: It killed me watching Russia overtly copy the US model of boogey-manning terrorism into an flexible excuse to expand State reach and power
  - dralley 3y ago
    er, copy? The first and second Chechen wars happened in the 1990s.
  - mandevil 3y ago
    In September 1999 a series of bombs tore apart four apartment buildings in three Russian cities, and the recently appointed (a month earlier) Prime Minister, a bright young former deputy mayor of St Petersburg named Vladimir Putin, whom no one had ever heard of and had many similarly positioned rivals, won a great deal of popularity for his handling of these "terrorist attacks" that killed 307 people, including re-invading Chechnya and starting the Second Chechen War. He then used that popularity to become essentially dictator for life. These bombings were blamed on Chechens- who hotly denied it. It has long been suspected- but not really proven- that the FSB was behind it, as a true False Flag operation to gin up support for invading Chechnya, done under the orders of former KGB/FSB agent Vladimir Putin who just happened to be the one to benefit most from the attacks. You can see the wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombing... to see more details on exactly what the evidence for this is, and the people who argue that there is just not enough evidence one way or another to assign responsibility. So, no, Russia was not "overtly copy the US model" if anything they were innovating it first and the US was copying.
    - lazide 3y ago
      [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)] Spanish American war? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident ] Gulf of Tonkin? The tail wagging the dog is as old as, well, government. Probably older. Nothing new under the sun, etc. etc.
ajuc 3y ago
Russian Orthodox church today is openly run by russian state officials, military, police, fsb members, etc. They are also openly supporting invasion of Ukraine as a kind of "holy war". The russian word for "non-government organization" is "foreign agent".
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  > The russian word for "non-government organization" is "foreign agent". Thats pretty accurate though.
  - ajuc 3y ago
    It's not, and westerners who think they agree don't actually agree, they are just edgy. It's hard to even explain what it would mean to internalize this belief system. Let me try. We're you ever on an amateur IT conference? Comicon? Some sports event? Would it ever occur to you to assume some government is secretly behind it? When the Jehova witnesses or scientologists knock on your door - which government is financing them to do it and why? After all people don't do things for free.
    - brookst 3y ago
      It’s just the reductive pedantry that’s so popular on the internet. A CIA operative is the agent of a foreign government, therefore a foreign agent. A Doctors Without Borders medic is an agent of a foreign organization, therefore a foreign agent. Therefore CIA and DWB are essentially the same thing. Bonus points if you can find one case where a DWB volunteer also had ties to the CIA, which would totally expose the two orgs as being exactly the same in all ways at all times. For some reason people just can’t resist reductionism.
      - fragmede 3y ago
        > For some reason people just can’t resist reductionism. Being a bit reductive there, eh? :)

mellutussa 3y ago

> €1.9 billion in assets it claimed were being held somewhere in the world I really hate it when I leave my billions somewhere in the world and can't remember where.

endymi0n 3y ago
[flagged]
FabHK 3y ago
There was a personal assistant who stole around GBP 4m from several of her bosses at Goldman Sachs. One of the bankers finally noticed when a 6-figure donation to Harvard bounced. One of other the victims later testified that his investment account felt "one or two million light". https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/secretary-who-had-a-aps4m-talent-for-stealing-from-her-superrich-bosses-56955.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/secretary-who-ha...
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  My friend once stated that "Financial security is when you don't know which day of the week your paycheck gets direct deposited". Imagine being so unfathomably wealthy you don't even know how much cash you should have control over from one day to the next. Actually don't, it's bad for your brain.
  - robocat 3y ago
    > unfathomably wealthy It's all just relative. I've mislaid thousands. That's years of income in many countries. You don't need to be that wealthy before a days wages for you is a months wages for someone poor in many countries. Indecently wealthy is relative: people look at their own incomes and often compare upwards but rarely seem to compare downwards.
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago
  Don't you just hate it when you can't recall if you were supposed to have 1 or 2 million on your investment account?

jgalt212 3y ago

If you pay the Big 4 enough money, they will look the other way or not ask for supporting documentation. Just google accounting scandals and see just how many of these shops were audited by the Big 4.

toyg 3y ago
Any tax authority worth their budget should require extra evidence from any Big-4 customer. By now it's clear they are less reliable than your average smalltown accountant. Unfortunately, there is typically a big revolving door between them and any tax institution. Why toil for decades in underpaid public roles, when you can step into the gilded world of consultancy and double or treble your salary? It's like the yacht scene in The Wolf of Wall Street, except in real life most civil servants take the corrupting deal (and I can't even blame them).
- hef19898 3y ago
  The audits done by the Big 5 in this context have nothing to do with taxes so.
- kortilla 3y ago
  Lol, if audits had to do with taxes and not defrauding investors, this would have made sense.
brookst 3y ago
It really depends on the terms of the audit. Routine financial audits are not intended to be exhaustive forensic audits that assume every document might be forged as part of a massive fraud. Most audits are just “does the documentation support the reporting”.
cortesoft 3y ago
Isn’t that just because most of the biggest companies are audited by the Big 4, and in order to be a big accounting scandal, you need to be a big company? I feel like this is pointing out something like, “More criminals drive Ford trucks than any other truck” which is true, but just because more people drive that brand than any other? Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/

hef19898 3y ago

EY believed the documents shown to them. Sloppy for sure, and EY got their amount of flak for it. People litteraly went to the banks in Asia during the extraordinary audit, something that is not usually done during "normal" audits. And yes, I also hate when I misplace my billions. Especially since I have yet to relocate them...

omega3 3y ago
> EY believed the documents shown to them. Sloppy for sure, and EY got their amount of flak for it. There are strict rules and guidelines around verifying an asset. The auditor isn't supposed to "believe the documents" - they need to form an independent opinion.^1 If the auditor is unable to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence to verify the asset, they can issue a qualified opinion due to a scope limitation. ^1 https://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/member/discover/cpd-articles/audit-assurance/specific-considerations.html https://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/member/discover/cpd-article...
- hef19898 3y ago
  Good nitpick. Thing is, the proof EY got from Wirecard was good enough to meet these thresholds, at least I never read or heard anything else. All that evidence was fabricated, of course. What EY did was ignoring all the warning signs they had: money laundering, making up business, fraud and all that. EY also wanted the proof the standards it seemingly met, that was the failure. But then those audits are not really meant to find organized fraud at a company to begin with.
  - omega3 3y ago
    > Thing is, the proof EY got from Wirecard was good enough to meet these thresholds It objectively wasn't. I've never heard of a case where the auditor doesn't independently verify the bank account balance with the bank itself. More reliable evidence reduces the need for additional corroborating evidence. In general the evidence obtained from the company itself wouldn't be considered reliable by itself. https://www.ft.com/content/db9fa3d7-11da-476e-beea-d5ed0ad137ed https://www.ft.com/content/db9fa3d7-11da-476e-beea-d5ed0ad13... This wasn't some hard to uncover marvel of accounting fraud using complex financial engineering.

rchaud 3y ago

EY offices in Singapore knew that their revenues were not traceable (Wirecard invented clients based in Asia). They hired a law firm to investigate, but the head office in Europe suppressed the findings because they wanted the contract.

hef19898 3y ago
Did this come up during the EY trials? Because this is the forat time I ever heard that.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Beijinger 3y ago

No, they did ask. And got Bank statements. They even went to a subsidiary branch of the bank and confirmed that the money exits in Indonesia (or was it the Philippines?). The problem: This bank had no branch in Singapore (or wherever it was). He set up a fake branch with actors that showed EY computer statements - EY took pictures of the screens - with the balance. You can't make this up. EY screwed up, but they could not have reasonably assumed that someone sets up a fake bank branch.

KingOfCoders 3y ago
Yes I know they did ask. As the responsible manager for IT (usually CTO - internal SOX was a different matter) I have been "asked" by EY (and KPMG) about IT setups and security several times for audits. And I could have told them whatever I like, the people were right out of university with no clue about the matter and in no position to ask the right questions except reading their checklist; I always had the impression they only knew half the words they were reading.
- 19h 3y ago
  Did you remove Wirecard from your LinkedIn?
  - alsetmusic 3y ago
    > Did you remove Wirecard from your LinkedIn? [Not the person you replied to.] Did the person you replied to work for LinkedIn? What's the context for this question?
    - 19h 3y ago
      I was just curious and visited the LinkedIn profile that's linked to from the ctone.ws website (in KingOfCoders's profile) and was wondering why Wirecard was omitted.
      - bitcharmer 3y ago

Log_out_ 3y ago

Well, Russian orthodox church was always cheka all the way from the top?