WinCapita, previously WinClub and GiiClub, was a Finnish Internet-based Ponzi scheme that advertised itself as a private investment club engaged in currency trading. In reality, it was a bucket shop like many other foreign exchange fraud schemes. It operated mainly in Finland, with a smaller number of members also in Sweden. The operation collected about 100 million euros from more than 10,000 investors, probably the largest fraud in Finnish history. [1] [2]
In March 2008, the National Bureau of Investigation started investigations of the club. [3] In December 2011, the District Court of Vantaa found the chief suspect Hannu Kailajärvi guilty of aggravated fraud, and sentenced him to four years in prison. [4] In February 2013, the Court of Appeal of Helsinki found him guilty of aggravated fraud and a money collection offence, and increased his prison sentence to five years. [5] The verdict was upheld by the Supreme Court.
The company presented itself as an invitation-only foreign exchange investment club that required an initial investment of several thousand euros while promising up to 4-fold returns. [6] As a proof of concept for its members it offered an automatic "signal clock" software which was said to predict good times to buy or sell a currency. [7]
Members for the new club were acquired at presentation meetings, to which current members were encouraged to bring friends, who could then in turn be persuaded into investing in the club. The importance of respect and loyalty to the club were underlined in its rules. [8]
The "investors' club" was especially popular on several web forums. The few lucky ones on the top of the pyramid who got initially paid told success stories to others, spreading trust to the club. According to intermediary police report over 10,000 people invested a total of almost 100 million euros in the club. However, only a small fraction of those have filed a police report so far.[ citation needed ] (About 2,250 as of June, 2009, for a sum of 33 million euros [9] [10] )
The investment company had been in operation since 2005 under the name "WinClub". The company was registered in Panama. [11] It changed its name to WinCapita when the MTV3 television channel reported in 2007 that the police were investigating a pyramid scheme. [7] The ongoing investigation had little effect on the club's membership, which continued to rise quickly. The club published reports to its members, where it claimed the media had made a mistake and the claims were out of line. [12] The operations continued as WinCapita until 7 March 2008. On this day, the web site of the company went offline [7] and the chief suspect, Hannu Kailajärvi, consequently disappeared from the public.
Kailajärvi was arrested in early December 2008 in Nässjö, Sweden. He had been hiding in a small cottage that had been acquired for him by a Sweden-residing person with a Finnish name. Kailajärvi was believed to have lived at least half a year in the cottage, telling his neighbours that he was renovating the house for a famous Finnish opera singer. Swedish police found three mobile phones in the cottage, and an Internet connection had been installed. [13] [14]
Even after Kailajärvi's disappearance, many club members still had faith in the club, forwarding reassuring emails to each other. In March 2009 the biggest Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat published an article [15] about the wild-running conspiracy theories surrounding WinCapita. Many former members still believed that the club had been legitimate and that the police and the Ministry of the Interior were concealing evidence. It was stressed in the report that the chief suspect Hannu Kailajärvi had reportedly already admitted in the questionings that the operation had been fraudulent.
In November, 2009, the investigation was ongoing, and the main suspect was held for trial in Finland. [16] Another suspect, who is thought to have had a more minor role in the scheme, was also being held after being arrested at the airport when returning from Thailand.
In late October, 2009 another suspect was arrested in the WinCapita case, this time by the Thai police. [17] He is said to have had a central role in the scheme. A warrant for his arrest was declared in absentia , and an Interpol red notice [18] was simultaneously issued.
The trial against the chief suspect Hannu Kailajärvi and his female associate began in February 2011 in the District Court of Vantaa. The accused were charged with aggravated fraud and a money collection offence. The prosecutor sought a minimum of five years in prison for Kailajärvi and forfeiting about six million euros to the state as criminal proceeds. Compensation to the victims will be tried in a separate case after the criminal trial has concluded, as will the criminal case against those up to 600 individuals that have been suspected of locally advancing the club. [19] [20]
A total of five people are suspected of involvement in the central organization of the scheme, but three of them remain at large, and could face court proceedings later. Kailajärvi and his female associate denied all charges, pleading that the proceeds were legally acquired as in any other business. The product that the company had been selling was a "signaling system", that the members could use in their own currency trading. According to the defence, the club did not ever involve itself in currency trading because the development of the automatic currency trading software had not finished. [19] [20]
Claims for damages in the court proceedings total to 37 million euros. In December 2011, the district court found Kailajärvi guilty of aggravated fraud and sentenced him to the maximum sentence of four years in prison. His female associate and former partner received a one year's suspended sentence. [4] Kailajärvi appealed the decision. In February 2013, the Court of Appeal of Helsinki found Kailajärvi again guilty of aggravated fraud and also additionally of a money collection offence, and sentenced him to five years in prison, with his female associate receiving a 15-month suspended sentence for assisting. [5]
Kailajärvi applied for a leave to appeal to the Supreme Court, [21] but the Supreme Court upheld the verdict, 5 years imprisonment with no parole for aggravated fraud and illegal fundraising. [22] Kailajärvi was released on parole in April 2014, and is writing a book about the case. [23]
There was another unsettled issue whose judicial process continued: whether the profits of WinCapita - some €20 million - could be considered proceeds of crime or not. The Court of Appeals of Eastern Finland decided (voting 2-1) that because part of the business conducted was legal, the profits cannot inherently be proceeds of crime. If they were, they would be confiscated by the government. [24] In October 2014, the Supreme Court of Finland decided that the profits are proceeds of crime, and can be confiscated. [25] The proceeds are used to compensate the victims. [26]
The Finns Party, formerly known as the True Finns, is a right-wing populist political party in Finland. It was founded in 1995 following the dissolution of the Finnish Rural Party.
The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) is a national law enforcement agency of the Finnish Police and the principal criminal investigation and criminal intelligence organization of Finland. The Bureau's main tasks are to counter and investigate organized crime, provide expert services, and develop methods for criminal investigation. NBI is also responsible for financial intelligence (FININT), such as preventing money laundering and terrorism financing. NBI headquarters has been situated in the city of Vantaa within the Capital Region since 1994 with field offices in Tampere, Turku, Mariehamn, Joensuu, Oulu and Rovaniemi. It is subordinate to the National Police Board under the jurisdiction of the Interior Ministry.
Ilkka Armas Mikael Kanerva was a Finnish politician and a member of the Parliament of Finland. He was born in Lokalahti, now a part of Uusikaupunki in Southwest Finland. He was the Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2007 to 2008. Kanerva was a member of the National Coalition Party.
The Runeberg prize is a Finnish literature prize founded in 1987.
Teuvo Hakkarainen is a Finnish politician and former member of the European Parliament. Before being elected to the European Parliament in the 2019 election, he had been a member of the Finnish Parliament since 2011.
Finland's overall corruption is relatively low, according to public opinion and global indexes and standards. The 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index released by Transparency International scored Finland at 87 on a scale from 0 to 100. When ranked by score, Finland ranked second among the 180 countries in the Index, where the country or countries ranked first are perceived to have the most honest public sector. Finland has ranked first, second or third every year since the current version of the Index was introduced in 2012. For comparison with 2023 worldwide scores, the best score was 90, the average score was 43, and the worst score was 11. For comparison with regional scores, the highest score among Western European and European Union countries was 90, the average score was 65 and the lowest score was 42.
The Ulvila homicide occurred in Ulvila, Finland, on December 1, 2006. The victim was a 51-year-old Jukka S. Lahti, a social psychologist and father of four. Initially, the police were looking for an outside perpetrator, but in September 2009, the victim's widow Anneli Auer was arrested and charged with the murder. She was twice convicted in the district court, but both times the appeals court reversed the verdict, and finally in December 2015, the acquittal became permanent, when the Supreme Court of Finland denied the prosecution's appeal.
Crime in Finland is combated by the Finnish police and other agencies.
Wille-Werner Rydman is a Finnish politician serving as Minister of Economic Affairs, representing the Finns Party and formerly the National Coalition Party. Rydman was elected to the parliament in 2015, gaining 4,524 votes in the elections. He has also been a member of the City Council of Helsinki since 2012. He received a Masters of Social Sciences from the University of Helsinki in 2008, after which he worked as a parliamentary assistant. On 6 July 2023, Rydman was appointed Minister of Economic Affairs in the Orpo Cabinet.
The 2017 Turku attack took place on 18 August 2017 at around 16:02–16:05 (UTC+3) when 10 people were stabbed in central Turku, Southwest Finland. Two women were killed in the attack and eight people sustained injuries.
Michael Maria Penttilä is a Finnish serial killer. According to Finnish crime magazine Alibi, he is the only Finn that fits FBI's description of a serial killer.
Finnish People First was a nationalist political party in Finland. It was founded in 2018 and de-registered in 2023 after failing to win seats in two consecutive parliamentary elections. In July 2023, the party filed for bankruptcy and announced its dissolution.
In December 2018, it transpired that adult men, all of whom had arrived in Finland as asylum seekers or refugees, were grooming, and raping and otherwise sexually abusing, girls under 15 years of age in Oulu, Finland. One victim ended up committing suicide. The Oulu Police Department warned young girls and parents, while emphasizing that "not all people with foreign backgrounds are dishonest or criminals".
The Oulu child murders is a Finnish murder case, referring to the discovery of the bodies of five infants in the basement of an apartment building in Oulu, on 3 June 2014. The mother of the babies, 35-year-old Kaisa Emilia Vornanen-Karaduman, had concealed the pregnancies and abandoned them, after giving birth at home. The Rovaniemi Court of Appeal sentenced her to 13 years imprisonment for five counts of manslaughter, but not for concealing a corpse. According to District Prosecutor Sari Kemppainen, who was the lead prosecutor for the case, there have been no similar cases in Finnish criminal history.
The COVID-19 pandemic in Finland has resulted in 1,499,712 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 11,466 deaths.
Vastaamo was a Finnish private psychotherapy service provider founded in 2008. On 21 October 2020, Vastaamo announced that its patient database had been hacked. Private information obtained by the perpetrators was used in an attempt to extort Vastaamo and, later, its clients. The extorters demanded 40 bitcoins, roughly worth 450,000 euros at the time, and threatened to publish the records if the ransom was not paid. To add pressure to their demands, the extorters published hundreds of patient records a day on a Tor message board.
The Koskela teen murder was a homicide that happened in Koskela, Helsinki, Finland on 4 December 2020. The victim was a 16-year-old whose name has yet to be released by Finnish law enforcement due to privacy regulations. The police charged three boys, all aged 16, with the murder. They were incarcerated in the Helsinki District Court on 10 December. The perpetrators and the victim knew each other beforehand. According to the police, the motive for the act was to punish the victim for some earlier activity.
The Cannonball Motorcycle Club (CMC) is an outlaw motorcycle club in Finland and Estonia. Founded in Helsinki in 1991, the club has eleven chapters and a membership of over two-hundred. Cannonball MC is designated as an organized crime group by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI).
Kankaanpää terrorism arrests were a string of arrests in Kankaanpää, Finland, against a group of young men who have been investigated for the preparation of a terrorist attack. The men planned blowing up the local refugee center and were equipped with guns and bombs for this purpose.
Timo Mikael Vornanen is a Finnish politician and a police officer. He is a member of the Parliament of Finland for the Finns Party.