'World's Most Wanted Man' Involveld In Bizarre Attempt To Buy Hacking Tools (vice.com) 27
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The fugitive executive of the embattled payment startup Wirecard was mentioned in a brazen and bizarre attempt to purchase hacking tools and surveillance technology from an Italian company in 2013, an investigation by Motherboard and the German weekly Der Spiegel found. Jan Marsalek, a 40-year-old Austrian who until recently was the chief operating officer of the rising fintech company Wirecard, seems to have taken a meeting with the infamous Italian surveillance technology provider Hacking Team in 2013. At the time, Marsalek is described as an official representative of the government of Grenada, a small Caribbean island of around 100,000 people, in a letter that bears the letterhead of the Grenada government. The documents were included in a cache published after Hacking Team was hacked in 2015. In recent days, Marsalek has been described as the 'world's most wanted man.'
It is unclear from the documents alone whether Marsalek played any role in the attempt to procure hacking tools, or whether his name was simply used. However, months before Marsalek appears to have contacted with Hacking Team, several websites with official sounding names such as StateOfGrenada.org were registered under the name of Jan Marsalek, as Der Spiegel reported last week. Some of the sites were registered with Marsalek's phone number and his Munich address at the time, and the servers were apparently operated from Germany. Wirecard provided digital payment services and was considered one of the most important companies in the financial tech industry. Wirecard offered a mobile payment app called Boon, which was essentially a virtual MasterCard card, it also offered a prepaid debit card called mycard2go, and worked with companies such as KLM, Rakuten, and Qatar Airways to manage their online transactions. The company suddenly collapsed in June after German regulators raided its headquarters as part of an investigation into fraudulent stock price manipulation and 1.9 billion euros that are missing from the company's books. Marsalek is now a fugitive and a key suspect in the German investigation. He reportedly fled to Belarus, and is now hiding in Russia under the protection of the FSB, according to German news reports. In the past, he was involved in other strange dealings: he bragged about an attempt to recruit 15,000 Libyan militiamen, and about a trip to Syria along with Russian military, according to the Financial Times.
It is unclear from the documents alone whether Marsalek played any role in the attempt to procure hacking tools, or whether his name was simply used. However, months before Marsalek appears to have contacted with Hacking Team, several websites with official sounding names such as StateOfGrenada.org were registered under the name of Jan Marsalek, as Der Spiegel reported last week. Some of the sites were registered with Marsalek's phone number and his Munich address at the time, and the servers were apparently operated from Germany. Wirecard provided digital payment services and was considered one of the most important companies in the financial tech industry. Wirecard offered a mobile payment app called Boon, which was essentially a virtual MasterCard card, it also offered a prepaid debit card called mycard2go, and worked with companies such as KLM, Rakuten, and Qatar Airways to manage their online transactions. The company suddenly collapsed in June after German regulators raided its headquarters as part of an investigation into fraudulent stock price manipulation and 1.9 billion euros that are missing from the company's books. Marsalek is now a fugitive and a key suspect in the German investigation. He reportedly fled to Belarus, and is now hiding in Russia under the protection of the FSB, according to German news reports. In the past, he was involved in other strange dealings: he bragged about an attempt to recruit 15,000 Libyan militiamen, and about a trip to Syria along with Russian military, according to the Financial Times.
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Just curious, what browser do you use?
scammer or fsb agent (Score:3)
Re:scammer or fsb agent (Score:5, Funny)
Probably about as much due diligence as BeauHD did in spellchecking the title.
Re:scammer or fsb agent (Score:5, Informative)
The agency responsible for the oversight of the banking industry ("BaFin"), and other agencies (responsible for overseeing the largest German companies (e.g. in the "DAX, similar to the Dow-Jones) had indications of phony transactions and questionable financial statements between Wirecard, its bank subsidiary and its international subsidiaries
However, the stories around this CFO are quite interesting to read about in themselves and are a seperate part of the scandal.
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What about Deutsche Bank and its role with oligarchs and Trump investments?
Never go full McAfee (Score:2)
Or you'll end up eating "****" live on the Internet.
Re:Never go full McAfee (Score:4, Funny)
Bizarre? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no such thing as bizarre when it comes to attempting to obtain hacking "tools".
motive ? (Score:2)
Aside from the current narrative that everything bad has to be connected to Russia somehow (someone dug up the old Cold War playbooks, it seems), what would be the motive for the FSB to hide a simple financial criminal ?
Re: motive ? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not uncommon for money laundering to involve Russians and it's not uncommon for Russian criminals to be protected by or acting in concert with Russian agents, such as FSB or GRU. So, it's conceivable that he's just got the right friends/business partners.
Russia is a bit like a narco-state or early 20th century Sicily. There's an entire quasi-legitimate criminal underworld that has effective influence over large parts of the government apparatus.
You had one job... (Score:2)
Why? (Score:3)
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"Did he blow up a city with a nuclear device? Sell a whole country into slavery? Pimp out a whole city's females? Steal or sell Weapons of Mass Destruction to a rogue group? Or have all those problems been solved now?"
Are those real problems? Has anyone ever done anything like those examples outside of a movie?
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I still don't get why he is the 'World's Most Wanted Man'.
He's the brother of "The Most Interesting Man in the World" but had to come up with his own slogan. He originally coined it to pick up chicks and it got away from him. Notice he didn't say "The Worlds Most SMARTEST Man."
BTW, yes they've all been solved. Haven't you noticed? We have to keep you always busy and distracted with SOMEthing, otherwise you'll start to think. And we all know THAT leads nowhere good -- or at least nowhere controlled. (Emotional addiction, adrenaline, and dopamine are such wo
Grenada, 'Urgent Fury' (Score:1)
"Grenada, a small Caribbean island of around 100,000 people"
No need to explain, countries that were invaded by the US are well known around here, due to the fantastic history classes in school.
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At least the US returns the countries it has invaded to their rightful owners, The US returned France, Italy, Japan, West Germany, Iraq, and Kuwait back to it's rightful owners. Russia has a tendency to annex every country they set foot on.
Maybe they can find the "worlds most wanted man" living next door to Snowden. Russia collects as many foreign fugitives as they can to use as bargaining chips.
Involveld? (Score:2)
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Beau is so bad at using computers he doesn't know how to enable spellcheck in all fields.
Seems pretty click-baitty. (Score:2)
Wirecard Targets Critics with Stalking (Score:3)
Just happened to listen to this podcast a few days ago:
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/02... [npr.org]
After a stock shorter did a write up on why they were a bad stock, calling attention to their connection to money laundering for online casinos, he was targeted by Wirecard. They sent guys to his house, emailed fake info about him to poeple in the industry, targeted him with spearphishing, etc. He ended up having to move.