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Greed-to-Grief, No. 15

Greed-to-Grief, No. 15

The missing $2.0 billion, the Honey Trap, and the Russian spy

George Pillari
August 07, 2025

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Interpol has a Red Notice out on Jan Marsalek, former senior executive of German payment processor Wirecard, which was caught in a financial fraud involving $2.0 billion of missing cash. A Red Notice from Interpol is the same as landing on the global most wanted list of criminals. The Red Notice alerts authorities worldwide to identify and detain Marsalek, if he can be found.

Interpol Red Notice for Jan Marsalek

Most of us know Interpol from the Mission Impossible or James Bond movies. The International Criminal Police Organization, or Interpol, is a central processing and management information hub for almost 200 countries. Interpol facilitates arrests and extraditions with the goal of stopping criminals. With its massive databases of fingerprints and DNA samples, Interpol has been instrumental in stopping many international crimes and played a role in the capture of Osama bin Laden.

Wirecard found its niche in processing payments for porn and gambling sites. Other payment processors shied away from these customers while Wirecard aggressively built its market share.

Wirecard experienced what appeared to be astonishing growth and it made sense to investors. Wirecard was a combination of a bank and credit-card processor, and it made comparisons to other similar companies difficult because most were either banks or processors.

Wirecard’s fraudulent behavior ran the gamut. For example, it would “round-trip” payments with customers. The customer sends Wirecard money, Wirecard books it as revenue, then Wirecard sends the funds back to the customer.

By setting up shell entities around the world, Wirecard could send invoices and claim to receive payments from these entities, even though no cash ever changed hands.

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If all this was not enough, Wirecard forged and backdated contracts to mislead its auditor.

Auditors are supposed to sample and verify information during an audit. If Wirecard employees fabricated contracts and backdated agreements, it is difficult for an auditor to catch these things, as is the case with any intentional deception, or as it is more commonly known, fraud.

Nevertheless, the Wirecard auditor, KPMG screwed this one up big time. As the company’s auditor, KPMG had a problem. It could call out its client for bad behavior and probably lose the account and millions of revenue, or could remain silent and not dig too deeply. KPMG remained silent.

Although he did not finish high school, Interpol Red Notice guy Jan Marsalek started at Wirecard in the IT department at an annual salary of $60,000. He rose through the ranks to become Chief Operating Officer and a member of the company’s executive committee, earning almost $4.0 million a year. And this does not count the likely amounts he embezzled before disappearing.

That $2.0 billion that was missing when the scandal broke in 2020? It is still unaccounted for today and Marsalek was the closest person to those alleged funds.

It was a great 20-year run for the company that became a darling of the German stock market.

Being touted as the next Apple or Microsoft put more pressure on Marsalek and his executive colleagues to deliver better and better results.

Inevitably, they could not get off the treadmill and started faking the numbers.

At some point, when a company’s cash in the bank does not match up to the revenues it claimed to collect, trouble is on the way. With Wirecard, it was $2.0 billion worth of trouble in the form of cash missing from its Asian subsidiaries.

All of Wirecard’s officers, including Marsalek were fired and awaiting criminal charges, when Marsalek went “poof” and vanished. In the five years since his disappearance, it has been discovered that Marsalek was much more than a senior executive at a financial company who perpetrated a fraud: he was a Russian spy.

When Wirecard imploded, Marsalek told people he was going to the Philippines to straighten out the “misunderstanding” about the $2.0 billion and clear his name. With multiple passports and other tools of spy craft, Marsalek could be anywhere in world. (He never made it to the Philippines.)

While Marsalek was still employed and things were going great at Wirecard, surveillance footage of the yacht of a Russian oligarch showed Marsalek with a beautiful Russian woman on his arm. Investigators concluded that Marsalek fell into a “honey trap,” as he was lured into the world of spies with a romantic encounter.

Natalie Ziobina, the Honey Trap

The woman and Marsalek became traveling companions and were spotted at various luxury resorts around the world running up big tabs while Marsalek was ostensibly traveling and entertaining as part of building the Wirecard business.

With access to the troves of transactional data that Wirecard processed, Marsalek could be a valuable asset to Russian intelligence. It is speculated that Marsalek identified travel plans and purchases of enemies of the Russian state through Wirecard transaction data and passed the information to his handlers at the Kremlin.

Usually, in a multi-billion-dollar fraud investigation, there is some kind of trail that authorities can follow. A criminal might use an alias one too many times or he might contact an old girlfriend. When these things happen, investigators are waiting and can make headway in tracking down the bad guy. Not with Marsalek. Nothing.

A Russian castle like the one Marsalek may be in

Current speculation is that Jan Marsalek is living in a protected castle in Russia and has assumed the identity of a priest who resembled him physically. The Kremlin denies these facts.

Key Takeaways

The auditor-company dynamic needs to be fixed someday before there are more Wirecards, Enrons, and others. Auditors need to able to stand up to their clients without fear of retribution.
When something looks like fraud, dig a little deeper and you will likely find more misdeeds.
How dumb do you think the Wirecard board members felt? Investors, including SoftBank, yes the same SoftBank that lost $15+ billion on WeWork, lost billions on the Wirecard fraud. Be careful as a board member.

Things I think about

There are more than one million high school football players in the U.S and 1,500 players in the NFL.