Forty years ago, money dispensing machines were not networked to a bank. Here a card with a magnetic tape was used (it did not yet have a chip). Information about transactions for each day was recorded with special magnetic ink for automatic reading in a journal, which was then delivered to the bank. Over time, such a system ceased to suit clients, because there was a limit on the number of transactions in one day. In addition, you could only receive money from your bank’s ATM. There were also certain inconveniences for banks, because such cards could only be issued to the wealthiest and most trusted clients, and this imposed restrictions on income from banking services. Therefore, in the mid-eighties of the last century, there was a need to do what seems so natural today - to connect ATMs to banks and combine disparate ATM networks into a single system. The leader of such an association in Switzerland - the global Mecca of bankers and financiers - was the Telekurs Card Solutions company, a subsidiary of a number of leading Swiss banks and, first of all, the almighty Union Bank of Switzerland or UBS for short (later it became part of the SIX company). Manufacturers of ATMs and software for them were such companies as the American AT&T and the German Siemens - Nixdorf.
Rene Osterwalder got a job at Telekurs right after his programmer training, when he was barely twenty. There was a lot of work and burnout was familiar to anyone who tried to enter the then relatively new field. After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Rene ended up in a recovery clinic and met Monica, who worked there as a nurse. Rene was of average height, skinny, awkward, with reddish-blond curls - a typical geek, of which there are many. After leaving the clinic, he decided to reconsider his values and goals. He no longer sought to embrace the immensity, and yet, in due time, Rene was increased in category and salary.
He and Moni got married and settled in Volketswil, a small industrial town near Zurich, in an unremarkable five-story building. Spring gave way to summer, ATM networks grew like mushrooms after rain, and one after another two little Osterwalders appeared in the family. Banks were getting rich and sought to protect their ATMs from unauthorized entry. Rene worked long and hard and it was his team that was tasked with developing a manual for the interbank communication software.
Since 1978, Telekurs has been installing and servicing ATMs in Switzerland. In 1978, the ATM network in Switzerland and Liechtenstein was running on BM (Bancomat)-78 software, and Telekurs was constantly expanding this network. In 1985, the BM-85 version was introduced: money could now be received using Eurocheque cards (EC-Karte) and EUROCARD. The next logical step was to entrust Telekurs with the integration of ATMs into the network. This required the introduction of a technical and protective standard that was mandatory for all. PPV-95 (Payment Protection Verfahren) became such a standard, and the technical prerequisites for fulfilling the conditions of this standard were laid down in the next software version, BM-90. BM-90 was a breakthrough in its own way: it made it possible for the first time to receive money from ATMs using cards issued abroad. The ATM system was now fully online.
Convenience and range of services had their price: for each withdrawal of money a certain percentage of the amount was charged plus 1 franc fee. For each withdrawal of money from a “foreign” ATM, they charged an additional 50 centimes. For each information about the current balance - 50 centimes. Money flowed into the bankers' pockets like a river. The second oil crisis of the late seventies and early eighties was forgotten like a bad dream. Now each bank sought to install as many of its own ATMs as possible, connected to a common network. And very soon, a large bank made Osterwalder an offer that he could not refuse: the thirty-year-old programmer was offered on favorable terms to lead the development of software for ATMs in accordance with the current manual of technical and safety requirements. “I couldn’t refuse” - that’s what they thought in the personnel department of this bank. Imagine their surprise when the curly-haired nerd refused them! The salary offered by the bank was four times higher than what Rene received at Telecourse. And yet he refused. And a few days later, an offer on the letterhead of the Osterwalder Informatic company was placed on the desk of the CIO of this bank. Rene, together with three colleagues from Telekurs, founded his own company. And the money flowed like a river.
The standard conditions for the development of such a software package were amounts in the range of fifty thousand francs and a period of up to three months. At the same time, it was necessary to take into account the fact that the new software would need to be tested and scrupulously checked for compliance with an extensive requirements manual. Osterwalder offered a ready-made package in three weeks and three hundred thousand francs. And the banks agreed. After all, all potential clients knew: in this case, the compliance would be one hundred percent, since Rene not only knew the manual by heart - he himself was the author of this manual! Therefore, Osterwalder could demand almost any amount - and receive it. Of course: during the months of delay, banks would inevitably lose much more profit. Everything that Osterwalder Informatic did came down to simply copying existing software and “repackaging” it in accordance with the bank’s corporate design. According to the then existing legislation, Telekurs was unable to prove the proprietary nature of the software, just as it could not prohibit its former employee from becoming a direct competitor. Otherwise, Telekurs would have to pay Osterwalder compensation for lost income over a long period of time.
In addition, Osterwalder skillfully used the so-called “soft skills” - he was able to quickly establish and maintain strong business contacts in high circles. Dinners in the best restaurants in Zurich, ski helicopter excursions, expensive gifts - any means were used.
"Marcus", then a project manager at one of the UBS subsidiary banks, recalls:
Osterwalder's list of acquisitions was not limited to the Jurassic chalet. One of the first purchases was a spacious house in a prestigious area on the shores of Lake Zurich, where he, Monika and the children moved from Volketswil. Rene continued to use the Volketswil apartment as an additional office. It was there that he first brought third-year student Augusta, the daughter of a famous Zurich dentist. The girl dropped out of law school and began working at Osterwalder's company. Augusta (Augustina, as he called her) was beautiful, well-educated, knowledgeable about fashion and art, and was interested in various philosophical movements, including Kabbalah and Taoism. It was with her that he took his first puff of cocaine, and it was Augusta who first brought him mushrooms. And she looked at Osterwalder as if he were a living deity.
Little by little he began to feel like one himself. Could it really have been a mere coincidence that he, a scruffy boy from a single-parent family from Wetzikon (Thurgau), who spent his entire childhood wandering around other people’s families assigned to him as temporary guardianship, was now immersed in fantastic luxury and the most influential people of the country were on an equal footing with him? ? No, this was not a game of chance, but a well-deserved reward for work, talent and business sense. On the advice of an investment banker friend, Rene continued to formulate an investment package. It included a villa in northern Italy, as well as industrial real estate and warehouse facilities in the Netherlands. They managed to purchase the warehouses for almost nothing, and upon arriving at the site to inspect them, Osterwalder immediately understood why this was so. The premises had been abandoned for several months, if not years, and during this time they had been chosen as a haven by a sect of Satanists.
Entering the concrete hangar with traces of soot and pentagrams on the walls, Osterwalder suddenly felt that same surge of adrenaline that he had been missing for a long time in real life. He clearly felt what it was like - the taste of omnipotence and insubordination. It was revealed to him that his life has a certain purpose and purpose - and they are not the same as everyone else's.
Marcus says:
“Marcus” and the whole country learned about what happened over the next days from the newspapers. Osterwalder contacted the police, claiming that his Albanian neighbor was part of an international criminal gang trafficking children. The police interrogated the neighbor, who explained that it was Osterwalder himself who approached him with a request, through an intermediary, to organize the purchase of “suitable” children in Eastern Europe and even made an advance payment of several thousand francs. The neighbor took the advance, but he didn’t intend to sell any children and doesn’t know about any groups. After this, the police searched Osterwalder's property and discovered a large amount of video footage, unequivocally proving that he was engaged in torture and “sexual acts” with children from 10 months (!) to 12 years. A container containing sulfuric acid and human remains was discovered on the premises of a chalet in the canton of Jura. There was a fully equipped torture chamber in the chalet's basement. On the territory of Osterwalder's Amsterdam warehouses there was a huge aquarium with piranhas. A suitcase with various medications, including anesthetics, as well as gynecological instruments, which were used for pornographic filming, was found in the trunk of his car.
If this had happened on the other side of the Atlantic, there would have been no crowd of reporters, all television channels would have covered the process, and even before its end at least two biographies of Osterwalder would have been published. But this is Switzerland - a country of banking gnomes and concrete secrecy. The entire process took place in the strictest secrecy. Under pressure from high-ranking friends of Osterwalder and the influential Augusta family, for a long time it was not even clear whether this case would even come to court! During the entire process, the girl went by only the initials A.Sh. As an accomplice, she received four years (instead of the eight that the prosecutor demanded) and was released a short time later, not yet reaching the age of thirty (since she was given pre-trial detention), then changing her first and last name.
In May 1998, 43-year-old Rene Osterwalder was found guilty by a Zurich jury of numerous attempted murders, numerous counts of causing grievous bodily harm, and numerous sexual acts against minors. He was sentenced to 17 years. The accusation was based largely on the huge amount of video footage filmed by Osterwalder himself, while only three victims were fully identified - a 12-year-old boy and the 10- and 18-month-old children of a Volketsville neighbor. The origin and further fate of the remaining children (presumably from Eastern European countries) could not be traced. Just as it was not possible to find out the identity of those whose corpses were dissolved in sulfuric acid in Osterwalder’s chalet. Much indicated that ritual murders took place in Amsterdam and Jura in the presence of a number of rich and high-ranking people, that is, these crimes were not the personal fetish of Osterwalder alone, but this evidence never reached the court.
This is roughly what an ordinary prison cell for two prisoners looks like: 11 square meters, a bunk bed, a wardrobe, a toilet behind a curtain, a sink, a TV, a fan, an electric kettle, an ashtray and an alarm clock. Many have their own coffee machines, and coffee can be purchased at the prison kiosk. Bed linen is changed weekly. Three meals a day. Smoking is allowed in the cell and the exercise yard. Each prisoner is entitled to one 60-minute visit per week.
Cell doors open in the morning at 7.45. From this moment until the cells are closed in the evening, prisoners can move freely around the territory. They can go to the shower, go to the fitness center, use the library and telephone (160 minutes per month). Cell phones are prohibited in prison, but they are smuggled in every now and then. Between 8-11, prisoners work in workshops and workshops, after which they have a 3-hour break. They are open again from 14:00 to 16:00. A prisoner can earn from 9 to 31 francs per day. Earnings are credited to the prisoner's account and he can pay at the prison kiosk using his name badge. Dinner at 17:00. At 6 p.m., the cell doors are locked again. You can rent a laptop and PlayStation, and pay for the rent with a badge. The laptop has only a simple text editor, a few games and an offline version of Wikipedia installed. Internet access is provided only under supervision, once a week. Every day one prisoner is in prison costs Swiss taxpayers 200-300 francs. Staying in a high security zone costs up to 650 francs. The costs of the Osterwalder trial exceeded 100,000 francs.
Osterwalder devoted his free time in prison to drafting appeals and counterclaims. He first argued that the unreasonably long duration of pre-trial detention (10 months) caused him irreparable moral damage. Two years later he declared that he had become a convinced Christian and was therefore no longer dangerous to society. In 2009, he decided to marry his cellmate, which he was denied (sexual contacts are prohibited in prison, so as not to encourage addiction, prostitution and the emergence of subcultures). At the end of 2010, Osterwalder married a 73-year-old pensioner from the canton of Thurgau (this marriage, or rather the official entry of the partnership into the civil registry, became possible since the pensioner was not a prisoner). After the pensioner's death in 2016, he entered into a new relationship, this time with a 38-year-old cellmate.
The initial seventeen-year sentence was extended indefinitely, since, according to experts, even today 65-year-old Rene Osterwalder, one of the biggest criminals in Swiss post-war history, still cannot be integrated into the ordinary environment. Every forensic expert who worked with him notes Osterwalder’s extremely high intelligence, high ability for mimicry and manipulation. Osterwalder meets the criteria for a severe, potentially dangerous personality disorder already in terms of his extreme and rapid changes in identity: a gifted technician, a fan of exotic philosophical movements, a successful businessman and IT boyar, a fighter against injustice, a respectable father of a family, a litigant and a querulist, a Christian fundamentalist and ascetic and, finally, a homosexual lover.
Rene Osterwalder got a job at Telekurs right after his programmer training, when he was barely twenty. There was a lot of work and burnout was familiar to anyone who tried to enter the then relatively new field. After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Rene ended up in a recovery clinic and met Monica, who worked there as a nurse. Rene was of average height, skinny, awkward, with reddish-blond curls - a typical geek, of which there are many. After leaving the clinic, he decided to reconsider his values and goals. He no longer sought to embrace the immensity, and yet, in due time, Rene was increased in category and salary.
He and Moni got married and settled in Volketswil, a small industrial town near Zurich, in an unremarkable five-story building. Spring gave way to summer, ATM networks grew like mushrooms after rain, and one after another two little Osterwalders appeared in the family. Banks were getting rich and sought to protect their ATMs from unauthorized entry. Rene worked long and hard and it was his team that was tasked with developing a manual for the interbank communication software.
Since 1978, Telekurs has been installing and servicing ATMs in Switzerland. In 1978, the ATM network in Switzerland and Liechtenstein was running on BM (Bancomat)-78 software, and Telekurs was constantly expanding this network. In 1985, the BM-85 version was introduced: money could now be received using Eurocheque cards (EC-Karte) and EUROCARD. The next logical step was to entrust Telekurs with the integration of ATMs into the network. This required the introduction of a technical and protective standard that was mandatory for all. PPV-95 (Payment Protection Verfahren) became such a standard, and the technical prerequisites for fulfilling the conditions of this standard were laid down in the next software version, BM-90. BM-90 was a breakthrough in its own way: it made it possible for the first time to receive money from ATMs using cards issued abroad. The ATM system was now fully online.
Convenience and range of services had their price: for each withdrawal of money a certain percentage of the amount was charged plus 1 franc fee. For each withdrawal of money from a “foreign” ATM, they charged an additional 50 centimes. For each information about the current balance - 50 centimes. Money flowed into the bankers' pockets like a river. The second oil crisis of the late seventies and early eighties was forgotten like a bad dream. Now each bank sought to install as many of its own ATMs as possible, connected to a common network. And very soon, a large bank made Osterwalder an offer that he could not refuse: the thirty-year-old programmer was offered on favorable terms to lead the development of software for ATMs in accordance with the current manual of technical and safety requirements. “I couldn’t refuse” - that’s what they thought in the personnel department of this bank. Imagine their surprise when the curly-haired nerd refused them! The salary offered by the bank was four times higher than what Rene received at Telecourse. And yet he refused. And a few days later, an offer on the letterhead of the Osterwalder Informatic company was placed on the desk of the CIO of this bank. Rene, together with three colleagues from Telekurs, founded his own company. And the money flowed like a river.
The standard conditions for the development of such a software package were amounts in the range of fifty thousand francs and a period of up to three months. At the same time, it was necessary to take into account the fact that the new software would need to be tested and scrupulously checked for compliance with an extensive requirements manual. Osterwalder offered a ready-made package in three weeks and three hundred thousand francs. And the banks agreed. After all, all potential clients knew: in this case, the compliance would be one hundred percent, since Rene not only knew the manual by heart - he himself was the author of this manual! Therefore, Osterwalder could demand almost any amount - and receive it. Of course: during the months of delay, banks would inevitably lose much more profit. Everything that Osterwalder Informatic did came down to simply copying existing software and “repackaging” it in accordance with the bank’s corporate design. According to the then existing legislation, Telekurs was unable to prove the proprietary nature of the software, just as it could not prohibit its former employee from becoming a direct competitor. Otherwise, Telekurs would have to pay Osterwalder compensation for lost income over a long period of time.
In addition, Osterwalder skillfully used the so-called “soft skills” - he was able to quickly establish and maintain strong business contacts in high circles. Dinners in the best restaurants in Zurich, ski helicopter excursions, expensive gifts - any means were used.
"Marcus", then a project manager at one of the UBS subsidiary banks, recalls:
Osterwalder's list of acquisitions was not limited to the Jurassic chalet. One of the first purchases was a spacious house in a prestigious area on the shores of Lake Zurich, where he, Monika and the children moved from Volketswil. Rene continued to use the Volketswil apartment as an additional office. It was there that he first brought third-year student Augusta, the daughter of a famous Zurich dentist. The girl dropped out of law school and began working at Osterwalder's company. Augusta (Augustina, as he called her) was beautiful, well-educated, knowledgeable about fashion and art, and was interested in various philosophical movements, including Kabbalah and Taoism. It was with her that he took his first puff of cocaine, and it was Augusta who first brought him mushrooms. And she looked at Osterwalder as if he were a living deity.
Little by little he began to feel like one himself. Could it really have been a mere coincidence that he, a scruffy boy from a single-parent family from Wetzikon (Thurgau), who spent his entire childhood wandering around other people’s families assigned to him as temporary guardianship, was now immersed in fantastic luxury and the most influential people of the country were on an equal footing with him? ? No, this was not a game of chance, but a well-deserved reward for work, talent and business sense. On the advice of an investment banker friend, Rene continued to formulate an investment package. It included a villa in northern Italy, as well as industrial real estate and warehouse facilities in the Netherlands. They managed to purchase the warehouses for almost nothing, and upon arriving at the site to inspect them, Osterwalder immediately understood why this was so. The premises had been abandoned for several months, if not years, and during this time they had been chosen as a haven by a sect of Satanists.
Entering the concrete hangar with traces of soot and pentagrams on the walls, Osterwalder suddenly felt that same surge of adrenaline that he had been missing for a long time in real life. He clearly felt what it was like - the taste of omnipotence and insubordination. It was revealed to him that his life has a certain purpose and purpose - and they are not the same as everyone else's.
Marcus says:
“Marcus” and the whole country learned about what happened over the next days from the newspapers. Osterwalder contacted the police, claiming that his Albanian neighbor was part of an international criminal gang trafficking children. The police interrogated the neighbor, who explained that it was Osterwalder himself who approached him with a request, through an intermediary, to organize the purchase of “suitable” children in Eastern Europe and even made an advance payment of several thousand francs. The neighbor took the advance, but he didn’t intend to sell any children and doesn’t know about any groups. After this, the police searched Osterwalder's property and discovered a large amount of video footage, unequivocally proving that he was engaged in torture and “sexual acts” with children from 10 months (!) to 12 years. A container containing sulfuric acid and human remains was discovered on the premises of a chalet in the canton of Jura. There was a fully equipped torture chamber in the chalet's basement. On the territory of Osterwalder's Amsterdam warehouses there was a huge aquarium with piranhas. A suitcase with various medications, including anesthetics, as well as gynecological instruments, which were used for pornographic filming, was found in the trunk of his car.
If this had happened on the other side of the Atlantic, there would have been no crowd of reporters, all television channels would have covered the process, and even before its end at least two biographies of Osterwalder would have been published. But this is Switzerland - a country of banking gnomes and concrete secrecy. The entire process took place in the strictest secrecy. Under pressure from high-ranking friends of Osterwalder and the influential Augusta family, for a long time it was not even clear whether this case would even come to court! During the entire process, the girl went by only the initials A.Sh. As an accomplice, she received four years (instead of the eight that the prosecutor demanded) and was released a short time later, not yet reaching the age of thirty (since she was given pre-trial detention), then changing her first and last name.
In May 1998, 43-year-old Rene Osterwalder was found guilty by a Zurich jury of numerous attempted murders, numerous counts of causing grievous bodily harm, and numerous sexual acts against minors. He was sentenced to 17 years. The accusation was based largely on the huge amount of video footage filmed by Osterwalder himself, while only three victims were fully identified - a 12-year-old boy and the 10- and 18-month-old children of a Volketsville neighbor. The origin and further fate of the remaining children (presumably from Eastern European countries) could not be traced. Just as it was not possible to find out the identity of those whose corpses were dissolved in sulfuric acid in Osterwalder’s chalet. Much indicated that ritual murders took place in Amsterdam and Jura in the presence of a number of rich and high-ranking people, that is, these crimes were not the personal fetish of Osterwalder alone, but this evidence never reached the court.
This is roughly what an ordinary prison cell for two prisoners looks like: 11 square meters, a bunk bed, a wardrobe, a toilet behind a curtain, a sink, a TV, a fan, an electric kettle, an ashtray and an alarm clock. Many have their own coffee machines, and coffee can be purchased at the prison kiosk. Bed linen is changed weekly. Three meals a day. Smoking is allowed in the cell and the exercise yard. Each prisoner is entitled to one 60-minute visit per week.
Cell doors open in the morning at 7.45. From this moment until the cells are closed in the evening, prisoners can move freely around the territory. They can go to the shower, go to the fitness center, use the library and telephone (160 minutes per month). Cell phones are prohibited in prison, but they are smuggled in every now and then. Between 8-11, prisoners work in workshops and workshops, after which they have a 3-hour break. They are open again from 14:00 to 16:00. A prisoner can earn from 9 to 31 francs per day. Earnings are credited to the prisoner's account and he can pay at the prison kiosk using his name badge. Dinner at 17:00. At 6 p.m., the cell doors are locked again. You can rent a laptop and PlayStation, and pay for the rent with a badge. The laptop has only a simple text editor, a few games and an offline version of Wikipedia installed. Internet access is provided only under supervision, once a week. Every day one prisoner is in prison costs Swiss taxpayers 200-300 francs. Staying in a high security zone costs up to 650 francs. The costs of the Osterwalder trial exceeded 100,000 francs.
Osterwalder devoted his free time in prison to drafting appeals and counterclaims. He first argued that the unreasonably long duration of pre-trial detention (10 months) caused him irreparable moral damage. Two years later he declared that he had become a convinced Christian and was therefore no longer dangerous to society. In 2009, he decided to marry his cellmate, which he was denied (sexual contacts are prohibited in prison, so as not to encourage addiction, prostitution and the emergence of subcultures). At the end of 2010, Osterwalder married a 73-year-old pensioner from the canton of Thurgau (this marriage, or rather the official entry of the partnership into the civil registry, became possible since the pensioner was not a prisoner). After the pensioner's death in 2016, he entered into a new relationship, this time with a 38-year-old cellmate.
The initial seventeen-year sentence was extended indefinitely, since, according to experts, even today 65-year-old Rene Osterwalder, one of the biggest criminals in Swiss post-war history, still cannot be integrated into the ordinary environment. Every forensic expert who worked with him notes Osterwalder’s extremely high intelligence, high ability for mimicry and manipulation. Osterwalder meets the criteria for a severe, potentially dangerous personality disorder already in terms of his extreme and rapid changes in identity: a gifted technician, a fan of exotic philosophical movements, a successful businessman and IT boyar, a fighter against injustice, a respectable father of a family, a litigant and a querulist, a Christian fundamentalist and ascetic and, finally, a homosexual lover.
