Tag: marijuana
Online investment scams on the rise
Online investment fraudsters are becoming more devious and organized, making their increasingly sophisticated scams tough to detect for ordinary investors. A bust carried out by Europol and local European law enforcement on the perpetrators of the €645 million JuicyFields marijuana investment scam on April 11 is a prime example. Europol estimates that 550,000 investors worldwide, most from Europe, were drawn into the scam. Using bank transfers or cryptocurrencies, around 186,000 participants transferred funds to JuicyFields from early 2020 to July 2022. The JuicyFields fraudsters used advertisements on social networks to lure victims to their websites. These offered crowdsourcing investment opportunities in the cultivation, harvesting, and distribution of marijuana plants to be used for medicinal purposes. For a minimum initial investment of €50 in a so-called ‘e-growing’ opportunity, investors were promised to be linked with producers of medical cannabis.