How the FT’s McCrum got into journalism

Ben Taub of The New Yorker writes about the Wirecard fraud and includes a passage about Financial Times reporter Dan McCrum, who uncovered the fraud. The story also details many of McCrum’s reporting strategies.

Taub writes, “Dan McCrum often jokes that his marriage was a minor fraud—his wife met him when he was a banker, but she ended up with a journalist instead. When McCrum was in his mid-twenties, he worked at Citigroup in London for four years, ‘which was long enough to look around the room and think, Hang on, there’s nobody I want to be here,’ he told me. One evening, he went out for dinner with a group of colleagues ‘and everybody was bitching about their jobs,’ he said. A young woman suggested that they go around the table and share their real aspirations, most of which required years of training or an advanced degree. ‘And when it came to me, without hesitation, I was, like, ‘I’d be a journalist,’ ‘ he said. ‘And the woman who had asked the question just looked at me as if I were a bit stupid and said, ‘Well, you know, you can just do that.’ ‘

“The timing was serendipitous; eighteen months later, in July, 2008, as a fledgling reporter at the Financial Times, McCrum was sent to New York, where he witnessed the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the chaos that ensued. By the end of the year, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme had unravelled, leaving investors some sixty-five billion dollars poorer. ‘It felt as if we were through the looking glass,’ McCrum recalled. ‘If a fraud of that magnitude was hiding in plain sight, then anything could be fake.'”

Read more here.