Wirecard sat on Germany’s DAX index with a valuation of 24 billion euros, a celebrated homegrown rival to Silicon Valley. Then, on June 25, 2020, it admitted that 1.9 billion euros, a quarter of its balance sheet, was missing and had probably never existed. This episode reconstructs how the illusion was built. Founded in 1999, the company began by processing payments for pornography and online gambling sites, slipped onto the stock market through a reverse merger with a defunct call center group, and then bought companies around the world to give the appearance of growth.

The core of the fraud lay in third-party acquirers in Asia, whose escrow accounts Wirecard counted as its own cash. When journalists and short sellers raised doubts, the company answered with spies and hackers, and the German regulator BaFin investigated the critics. The episode follows the whistleblower, the KPMG audit, the collapse, and the executives who were arrested or vanished.

• In 2015 Wirecard paid 340 million euros for an Indian payments group whose founders had recently valued the key assets at 46 million, and at least 175 million of the price never reached the seller.
• Nearly all of the reported profit ran through three opaque partners in Asia, and auditor EY accepted confirmation letters and screenshots instead of checking with the banks.
• Wirecard hired a former head of Libyan foreign intelligence to run stings on critics, along with a hacker for hire later sentenced to 80 months in a U.S. prison.
• BaFin banned short selling of Wirecard stock for two months in 2019. Its president, Felix Hufeld, was forced out in January 2021.
• CEO Markus Braun was arrested, while chief operating officer Jan Marsalek fled and remains on Europol’s most wanted list. Whistleblower Pav Gill, a company lawyer in Singapore, supplied the documents that broke the story.