In the unlikeliest of ways I would find myself among the cream of London society, among the oldest and wealthiest moneyed families in Europe, in a world of expensive cars and caviar and yachts, among the elite. McCrum (with backing from the Financial Times) admirably pursues his quarry until steadfast short-sellers are finally vindicated: the scales fall from investors’ eyes and agencies are shaken awake from their regulatory slumber. And just now, grandpa had launched into the blessing, and everyone had remained quiet and still until the final word – Amen. As I shuffled through files in a rusty file cabinet I felt overwhelmed by the sense that I should not be here.

He never guessed that assisting the diffident but sexy Alice would be so captivating and make it so hard to keep his desires in check. I picked up the book because I am interested in how cycles of hype and big promises get driven both by investors who wants entrepreneurs to dream big and entrepreneurs who need hype for cash to create new tech, and went in to it assuming that it there would be some grey-zones of unjustified tech hype which would eventually turn in to fraud to cover expenses, but was surprised to learn that it was one hundred percent pure gangsterism from day one. From the dining room came the sound of talking and laughter, but I was not ready to see the whole family yet.The problem is McCrum is just another humble servant of the system: ignore the ongoing scams, concentrate on those who don't have the political clout of a Visa or Pfizer. One of these courageous individuals is Pav Gill, a lawyer who worked inside Wirecard’s Asia headquarters and discovered that the company’s finance team faked contracts and forged invoices. From there, he documents the unexceptional origins of Wirecard in Germany and the company’s ensuing rapid global growth (including a Dublin office).

When in 2014, Dan McCrum, a bank analyst turned investigative journalist, received a tip about “German gangsters” running a company that advertised itself as the German PayPal, he could not have imagined that his reporting would allow him to expose the biggest corporate scandal in post-war Germany. When journalist Dan McCrum followed a tip to investigate the hot new tech company challenging Silicon Valley, everything about Wirecard looked a little too good to be true- offices were sprouting up around the world, it was reporting runaway growth and the CEO even wore a black turtleneck in tribute to Steve Jobs. The person identified as the main man behind most of the dodgy dealings, COO Marsalek, escaped, and there are rumours that he's living under the protection of GRU in Moscow. McCrum is the investigative journalist at Financial Times who's exposé of the DAX 30 company Wirecard's accounting fraud took their market capitalisation from €24 billion (more than Deutche Bank) to € 0. As McCrum dug deeper, he encountered a story stranger and more dangerous than he ever imagined- a world of short sellers and whistleblowers, pornographers and private militias, hackers and spies.That they are willing to take enormous risk, and bend every available rule comes with the territory I assume.

This book details the lengths to which people within the company Wire card went to hide evidence of fraud, and the efforts of one journalist to uncover it. Easy to see why many choose to continue cradling the shepherd’s crook rather than grasping the sling.An enterprising young fellow in Consett had punters from the local watering hole sign legal documents (at 50 quid a piece) to become company directors so the Wirecard affiliate could fraudulently process high-risk transactions. As disgraced US president Richard Nixon demonstrated and as Washington pundits like to remind us, it's often not the crime that does the damage. Eagerly I lifted the receiver, but instead of the client with the challenging case I was hoping for, Mum’s voice came at me in a rush.