[–] theturtletalks 3 days ago
[–] sofixa 3 days ago
Wirecard were a German fintech, but didn't have big market penetration across Europe. They were a real company with real operations, but a decent part of its balance sheet was fake (supposedly it was in an Asian subsidiary, there was no money there). It wasn't a front for Russian intelligence, it's COO was a Russian operative (and nowadays runs a shadow intelligence agency from Moscow, using incompetent morons to try to kidnap journalists, or scheming to hire ISIS suicide bombers to blow them up); those connections only surfaced after the whole thing imploded. But the whole company was an actual real place with real operations and real non-russian intelligence employees. It's still not certain if the CEO knew about the COO for instance.
Read the FT series on the whole thing, their investigation started the collapse.
[–] mort96 3 days ago
There are many good non-Hetzner European hosting companies, luckily.
Turns out it was a front for Russian intelligence. Even after the German government found out, the guy still somehow escaped to Russia. There’s a solid chance that Russia operatives have infiltrated the German government. They was even a big hack Russia’s state hackers did and a lot of information was leaked.
I bring this up because Hetzner was asking for my passport to buy a $10/m server. Simple opsec says to just pay a bit more and use DigitalOcean or some other VPS.