by Gianluca Paolucci
He worked for Reuters and La Stampa covering finance, bank crashes, financial crime and corruption. Since 2022 he has been editor-in-chief of Verità & Affari and writes for La Verità and Panorama.
Nine arrests, 38 searches, 9 million in assets seized. These are the numbers of the maxi-operation which involved over 400 police officers 11 countries – including Italy – as part of the investigation into the fraud of JuicyField, the platform that offered investments in medical cannabis promising fabulous earnings and which turned out to be a scam. He made it known Europolwhich he calculated in at least 645 million euros the amount of the fraud to the detriment of at least 550 thousand people in what has been called a classic “schema Ponzi”. But, explains a note from Europol, “the numbers could be much higher” for what turned out to be a true multinational crime company, with suspects of at least 10 different nationalities.
Huge earnings with minimal investment
The scam scheme involved the offer of investment in medical cannabis seedlings, which would be remunerated with the sale of the mature plant at harvest time. For a minimum investment of just 50 eurosJuicyfield promised returns in the range of 100%.
A Russian citizen, believed by the authorities to be one of the “minds” of the organization, was tracked down by the Spanish authorities in the Dominican Republic, where he was reached by the measure carried out with the cooperation of the local police forces. The suspects are mainly Russians but also Dutch, Germans, Italians, Latvians, Maltese, Poles, Jordanians, Americans and Venezuelans. The seizures concerned 4.7 million euros in bank accounts, 1.5 million in cryptocurrencies, 2.7 million in real estate assets and 150 thousand euros in cash.
Two years ago the crash
The Juicyfield scandal broke in July two years ago, when investors – defined as e-growers – suddenly found their “accounts” at Juicyfield blocked. Since then, a series of complaints and investigations have started in various European countries, coordinated by the German and Spanish authorities (the company was based in Berlin).
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