ACFE awards Dan McCrum the 2021 Guardian Award.
Dick Carozza (Fraud Magazine)
3/29/2021
Wirecard's house has tumbled and McCrum is relieved that the Wirecard story has reached its apparent denouement, but he’s still frustrated it took six years of investigative reporting to get to this point. “With every story, we at FT Times thought, “This is it”. This story will finally make people realize.’ But it wouldn’t because the BaFin, the German authorities, had effectively demonized the journalists bringing the bad news.
ACFE awards Dan McCrum its 2021 Guardian Award. McCrum is an investigative reporter for the Financial Times and has spent six years questioning the finances of Wirecard, Germany’s moneymaking payments processor. He is praised for his bulldog tenacity and resolve to uncover a behemoth fraudulent company that falsely touted assets of more than $26 billion before its demise in 2020.
In August 2014, McCrum, then a reporter for the Financial Times’ blog, FT Alphaville, was looking for companies “with problematic accounting,” as he calls them. He didn’t realize that he’d soon be involved in a six-year investigation that would make him the target of German banks and regulators, threaten his reputation and make him look over his shoulder at night.However, in the end, his investigations helped bring down Wirecard, the 20-year-old fraudulent payments processor firm from Munich. And they gave him some great stories to tell. Read further at www.fraud-magazine.com.