Jacques Guillaume: Business deal gone bad

Jacques Guillaume: Business deal gone bad

The client was a mid-sized textile importer who had wired €420,000 to a Swiss-registered company for a shipment of specialty fabrics that never left the port of Genoa. Guillaume met him in a café near Place Bellecour. The paperwork looked clean: invoices, a letter of credit, even a video call recording of the seller. Guillaume’s first step was to reverse the company registration through a contact in Zurich. The firm existed for eleven weeks, used a virtual office, and listed a director whose real identity traced to a man already wanted in Marseille for similar frauds.

Guillaume flew to Genoa the next day. Dock records showed the containers had been booked but cancelled two hours after the wire cleared. The freight forwarder, a small family firm, had been paid a modest fee to generate the paperwork and then told the goods were “rerouted.” The money had moved through two shell accounts and landed, briefly, in a bank in Monaco before disappearing into a network of crypto wallets. Guillaume spent three days reconstructing the path with a forensic accountant he trusted from an old case. The final wallet belonged to a name that matched a known associate of the Marseille fraudster—someone who had once worked in the same district as Guillaume’s old unit.

He returned to Lyon with the chain of transfers and a recording of the associate boasting about the score in a bar. The client recovered roughly a third of the funds after the banks froze the intermediate accounts; the rest was gone. Guillaume handed over the file and the recording without comment. The importer asked whether the man could be found. Guillaume gave him the last known address in a suburb of Marseille and the name of a local lawyer who handled such recoveries. “The deal was never real,” he said. “Only the money was.” He took the train back to Lyon that evening, ordered a single pastis at his usual bar, and opened the next file.