Re:Wirecard CEO exits as search for missing billions hits de...
by thu2111 on Friday June 19, 2020 @11:30AM
(#23575436)
Fraud like this isn't common, is it. I think there's a question of scale. There are tens of thousands of banks in the world, and hundreds of thousands of financial firms in general. Perhaps more. Money goes missing on this scale once in a blue moon compared to how much is processed.
Re:Wirecard CEO exits as search for missing billions hits de...
by hitpointdrew on Friday June 19, 2020 @10:05AM
(#23574632)
>Real people lost a lot of BTC on Mt Gox, so I'm not sure how the BTC stories are in outer space.
That was the fault of Mt. Gox, not bitcoin. Also the fault of uneducated users, don't leave your bitcoin sitting at an exchange.
Re:Wirecard CEO exits as search for missing billions hits de...
by pjc50 on Friday June 19, 2020 @10:08AM
(#23574662)
^ This is what I meant by the bitcoin community defining fraud as "not fraud, also your fault"
Re:Wirecard CEO exits as search for missing billions hits de...
by hitpointdrew on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @03:50PM
(#23619330)
You clearly don't understand how bitcoin works.
Saying Bitcoin is flawed because Mt. Gox got hacked, is like blaming the manufacturer of your car because it was stolen when you left it in parking garage with no attendant, and left the keys in the ignition with the window down.
There was no technological flaw with bitcoin itself, there was plenty of technical flaws with Mt. Gox web site.
Re:Wirecard CEO exits as search for missing billions hits de...
by FireBeyond on Friday June 19, 2020 @03:29PM
(#23578047)
Right, and Enron, E&Y style frauds were the fault of those companies, not fiat money.
But ask a BTC True Believer and they will talk about how inherently flawed money is with respect to this because of how people act, and yet BTC is not inherently flawed despite how people act.
Apart from that, the second half of your first sentence is exactly the question - is fraud endemic to this industry, and actually central to its operation?
The popular perception is that the industry is somehow fundamentally honest with a few bad-actor exceptions.
Considering how regularly fraud happens, how damaging it is, and how rarely it's flagged by auditors and regulators, I think it would be useful to question that view.
Or to invert the polarity - how many significant potential frauds have been prevented by auditors and regulators, or by paperwork theatre like KYC?
Are there any? If so, how do the numbers compare with the number of frauds that blow up into real financial and reputational damage?