🇩🇪 Wirecard Fraud Explained! What went WRONG!
Oct 25, 2026 · 21 min · 18 segments
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Oct 25, 2026 · 21 min · 18 segments
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
And Wirecard is a credit card processing company, which means that they stand in the middle between the consumer, the bank and the merchant.
And what they do is they settle the transaction or the funds from the issuing bank and deposit that into the merchant account.
And their slogan or their mission was to create a cashless society with a reliance less and less on cash and more reliance on smartwatches so you pay for your transaction with a smartwatch or a smartphone and even less reliance on the physical card itself.
And at their highest valuation in 2018, their market capitalization or the valuation in the market reached $24 billion.
And right before the insolvency in June of 2020, that had declined a bit to $12 billion.
Obviously, the decline from 2018 to 2020 was due to all of the things that we'll talk about a little bit later here.
Let's look into what happened because Wirecard was expanding globally at a very fast pace.
And what they did is because they didn't have the necessary licensing to operate in certain jurisdictions that required to get a licensing for a credit card processor, which took a while to get.
And so instead of doing that, They partnered with third party companies that already have the licensing in the Philippines, Singapore, and Dubai.
And then what the agreement was that Wirecard would push the transactions to them for them to process.
And then these companies would then kick back a commission to Wirecard on these transactions, which sounded fine.
And the cash was being deposited in an escrow account, which normally would be fine.
And Wirecard is a credit card processing company, which means that they stand in the middle between the consumer, the bank and the merchant.
And what they do is they settle the transaction or the funds from the issuing bank and deposit that into the merchant account.
And their slogan or their mission was to create a cashless society with a reliance less and less on cash and more reliance on smartwatches so you pay for your transaction with a smartwatch or a smartphone and even less reliance on the physical card itself.
And at their highest valuation in 2018, their market capitalization or the valuation in the market reached $24 billion.
And right before the insolvency in June of 2020, that had declined a bit to $12 billion.
Obviously, the decline from 2018 to 2020 was due to all of the things that we'll talk about a little bit later here.
Let's look into what happened because Wirecard was expanding globally at a very fast pace.
And what they did is because they didn't have the necessary licensing to operate in certain jurisdictions that required to get a licensing for a credit card processor, which took a while to get.
And so instead of doing that, They partnered with third party companies that already have the licensing in the Philippines, Singapore, and Dubai.
And then what the agreement was that Wirecard would push the transactions to them for them to process.
And then these companies would then kick back a commission to Wirecard on these transactions, which sounded fine.
And the cash was being deposited in an escrow account, which normally would be fine.
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