Risk register · entry
Q-F · FraudWirecard
A DAX champion's audited escrow balances were forgeries.
The fifth quadrant, where the thing was never real. The tell is that the story is too clean.
Why this room
The underlying payoff structure was deliberately kept simple and binary, real cash or fabricated cash, single-signature verification, rather than a complex layered instrument, but because the deception was actively concealed the tail was silent for years and then discontinuous, a full collapse compressed into roughly one week once the Philippine banks denied the accounts, which is the classic fat-tail signature of the fraud quadrant.
The record
- €1.9 billion reported missing / fabricated cashcertain
- Wirecard peak market value approx. €24 billion (2018, DAX era)likely
- Insolvency filing date: 25 June 2020certain
- Markus Braun arrested 22 June 2020, released on €5 million bail 23 June, re-arrested 22 July 2020certain
- FT first published its Wirecard investigation 30 January 2019likely
- Philippine banks (BDO Unibank, BPI) disclaimed the escrow documents on/around 16-18 June 2020likely
- German court ordered Braun and two other ex-executives to pay €140 million in damages to the insolvency administrator (ruling reported late 2024/early 2025)likely
- Braun faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted on all charges; criminal trial (started December 2022) still without a verdict as of mid-2026certain
- Jan Marsalek fled to Belarus after his dismissal and remains on Europol's most-wanted listlikely
- Wirecard joined the DAX 30 in September 2018, replacing Commerzbanklikely
Sources
The book
This entry is one of 111 in the register. The full story, and what it cost the people who lived it, is in Risky Business by Claudia Zeisberger, David Munro and Joanna Reijgersberg-Siew.
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