Systemic flaws of the payment industry
The #DirtyPayments series reveals a major European financial scandal. It shows how, during the last decade, the French giant payments company Worldline and its German subsidiary Payone have systematically processed dubious and fraudulent online transactions worth billions of Euros, facilitating large scale scamming, controversial porn sites, prostitution networks, illegal casinos and even possible money laundering operations. This happened right under the noses of European bank regulators.
Dirty Payments exposes the extent of systemic structural flaws of the payments industry and some of those behind well-disguised scams that have defrauded people across the world. [Published 25.06.2025]
UPDATE: During June 2026 EIC continues publishing about the “Dirty Payments” industry, this time focusing on the British payments platform WISE, which is investigated in Belgium by judicial authorities related to possible money laundering in in hundreds of criminal investigations in Europe, for more then EUR 500 million suspicious transactions.
Initiators
For the Worldline stories, the initiators were European Investigative Collaborations (Ștefan Cândea) and Mediapart (Yann Philippin); For the WISE stories, the initiator was Le Soir (Louis Colart)
Participants
Reporting
Yann Philippin, Clément Rabu (Mediapart), Sven Becker, Roman Höfner, Sara Wess, Christoph Winterbach, Nikolai Antoniadis (DER SPIEGEL), Tom Kreling, Rik Wassens, Jeroen Wester (NRC), Ruben Mooijman and Nikolas Vanhecke (De Standaard), Micael Pereira (Expresso), Louis Colart, Joel Matriche, Julien Bialas (Le Soir), Begona Ramirez, Sergio Sangiao (infoLibre), Jonas Pröschold, Carl Emil Arnfred, Anders Bæksgaard, Magnus Kofoed Lassen (Politiken), Enrico Kampmann (Die Wochenzeitung), Janine Louloudi, Konstantina Maltepioti (Reporters United), Micael Pereira (Expresso), Ola Haram (VG), Steffi Hasler, Kilian Küttel (SRF), Ada Constanda, Razvan Lutac, Victor Ilie (Snoop.ro), Ildiko Kovacs, Ibolya F. Vitez (24.hu), Piotr Szostak (TVN24), Adrian Sadikovic (Dagens Nyheter), Simon Lock (TBIJ), Frédérik Plante (Toronto Star), Nicholas Rodello (Drop Site News), Ștefan Cândea, Blaz Zgaga, Natalia M. (EIC).
Information Design: Lynne Brouwer (NRC) and Elsa Hundertmark (DER SPIEGEL), Simon Toupet (Mediapart)
Data analysis: Yann Philippin (Mediapart), Konstantina Maltepioti (Reporters United), Christoph Winterbach (Der Spiegel) and Rik Wassens (NRC)
Project Design & Guide
Ștefan Cândea
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