Scarred by Wirecard, Germany Takes on a Global Payments Scandal
Five years after Wirecard’s collapse, authorities uncovered a €300 million fraud that has engulfed staff at multiple payment companies.
Documentation for the Wirecard inquiry in Berlin in 2020.
Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/BloombergWhen the FBI arrested Ruben Weigand on a March 2020 layover at Los Angeles International Airport, alarm bells rang at payment companies thousands of miles away in Europe.
The German national had connected several of them — including the now-defunct Wirecard AG and a business called Payone that is now part of Worldline SA — to lucrative customers, such as operators of pornography and dating websites, according to people familiar with the matter.