The Plant That Wasn’t There. How cannabis became the perfect cover story for the oldest scam in the book
The number on the screen kept growing. Every few weeks, the investor dashboard credited another harvest: twenty-six grams, then a hundred and seventy-eight, then two hundred and sixty-six. Somewhere in a Swiss greenhouse—so the website said, so the live feed suggested, so the cheerful Telegram group confirmed—a cannabis plant you had bought for a few hundred euros was working on your behalf, photosynthesizing its way toward your retirement. There was only one discrepancy, easy to miss at first and impossible to ignore later: next to the column of accumulating grams sat a cash balance, and the cash balance read zero. Between the number that grew and the number that didn’t lay a gap into which, across Europe, several hundred thousand people have now fallen.
The cannabis-investment pyramid is among the more elegant frauds of the past decade—elegant in the way a well-built trap is elegant. Unlike the crypto schemes it ran alongside, it did not ask investors to believe in algorithms or arbitrage or the visionary genius of a founder in a black turtleneck. It asked them to believe in a plant. A green, fragrant, photogenic plant. Sometimes, inconveniently for everyone involved, a real one.
The model the industry’s con artists perfected around 2020 goes by the name “e-growing,” and its architecture is almost insultingly simple. A company—typically registered in a jurisdiction whose name evokes liberal cannabis policy: Switzerland, the Netherlands, Portugal—offers investors the chance to buy seedlings, or shares in future harvests. The unit price is calibrated with some psychological care: a few hundred euros, enough to feel like a serious investment, not enough to warrant a call to one’s accountant. The company promises to do the actual farming. Harvests arrive every ten to twelve weeks; the firm buys back your share of the crop at a fixed price per gram; the returns, in the genre’s golden years, ran to double digits per quarter. Le Monde’s investigators later noted what any farmer could have said at the outset: paying out “interest” automatically every hundred and eight days is impossible in agriculture, where production answers to weather and blight rather than to a payment calendar, and the promised buyback prices per gram sat far above anything the actual market would bear. And then comes the flourish that turns a bad investment into a self-replicating one: a referral program. Bring in a friend and you earn a commission on his deposit—and on the deposits of everyone he brings in, several levels deep.
Here is where the botany ends and the geometry begins. In legitimate multilevel marketing—a business model with its own well-documented pathologies, but a legal one—commissions flow from selling actual products to actual consumers. In the cannabis schemes, the internal point system gave the game away to anyone who looked: selling one “investment plant” generated roughly ten times the commission value of selling a bottle of CBD oil. The engine of the enterprise was not the product. It was recruitment. Polish law, as it happens, prohibits precisely this—a promotional scheme in which a participant’s earnings depend chiefly on enrolling others rather than on selling anything—and so, in their various phrasings, do the consumer-protection regimes of most of Europe. The companies operated anyway, on the sound actuarial logic that regulators move slowly and greenhouses photograph well.
Why cannabis? Every investment fraud needs a cover story—a narrative that explains where the impossible returns come from—and cannabis turns out to be very nearly the perfect one, for three reasons.
The first is that the underlying story is true. The market really was booming. Country after country was legalizing medical marijuana; cannabis companies commanded billion-dollar valuations on North American exchanges; European cannabis investment grew by a hundred and thirty per cent in the first half of 2021 alone. A fraudster pitching a cannabis venture did not need to invent a growth narrative. He could clip it from the Financial Times. The lie required was smaller and more local: not that the industry was real, but that he was part of it. The boldest operators went further still—JuicyFields, the genre’s flagship, claimed partnerships with the publicly traded giants Aurora Cannabis and Canopy Growth; both companies denied any affiliation.
The second is regulatory fog. The average European investor did not know—why would he?—that the legal status of CBD on the continent was tangled as the roots of the plant itself. Hemp extracts had sat since January 2019 in the European Union’s “novel food” catalogue, a classification that in practice barred their sale as food or supplements pending an authorization that, to this day, has not come. The European Court of Justice ruled in 2020, in the Kanavape case, that CBD is not a narcotic—but the ruling concerned drug law, not food law, and the fog over the supplement aisle persisted. Switzerland ran its own regime entirely, with a THC threshold of one per cent—three times the European Union’s 0.3—which made the country an attractive flag of convenience for cannabis-adjacent registrations. Pharmaceutical-grade certifications applied to medical cannabis production and had nothing to do with CBD flower destined for wellness shops. Into this fog a marketing department could fire claims of great confidence and total falsity—”CBD is one hundred per cent legal across Europe!”—with little risk that a customer would, or could, check.
The third reason is the simplest. The plant is beautiful. A nineties pyramid scheme could show its marks an office tower and the chairman’s sedan. A cannabis pyramid shows them life: racks of seedlings under LED suns, irrigation computers blinking, gloved workers moving through rows of green. Some of that infrastructure, in some of these schemes, actually existed—and this fact deserves a moment of attention, because it sits at the center of how intelligent people get taken.
The most common error in thinking about investment fraud is the argument from evidence: But I saw the photos. There was a real facility. Real plants. The error lies in believing that the existence of infrastructure proves the existence of a business. To the operator of a pyramid, a showcase plantation is not a contradiction; it is a line item. It belongs to the same budget category as the booth at the trade fair, the sponsored influencers, the Berlin office—marketing expenses, all of them, paid for out of investor deposits. How far the logic extends was documented by Dutch public broadcaster BNNVARA, whose reporting revealed that JuicyFields paid South American plantations to install webcams and hang JuicyFields banners—props arranged solely so that an investor watching the live feed would believe he was looking at “his” plants. The company itself, meanwhile, was entered in the Berlin trade register not as a cannabis enterprise but as a gardening-supply business, and at no point held a license to sell investment products of any kind.
The arithmetic that unmasks the scheme is always the same and always brutally simple: compare the chronology of revenues with the chronology of payouts. If a company is distributing commissions in the tens of thousands of euros per month before any crop could have been harvested, dried, and sold, the money is coming from exactly one place. New deposits. This is the defining mechanic of the scheme Charles Ponzi gave his name to in 1920, when the underlying asset was international postal-reply coupons, and it has not changed since—only the foliage has.
For the same reason, the partial payouts that participants receive prove nothing about the system’s health. They are not evidence against the fraud; they are its fuel. An investor who has received his first disbursement stops asking questions and starts recruiting. From the operator’s perspective, this is the cheapest advertising on earth: return to a man six per cent of his own money, and he will bring you three new depositors as a gesture of gratitude. Bernard Madoff paid his clients “returns” for decades. Not one dollar of it came from an investment, because there were no investments.
The recruiting, meanwhile, runs on a fuel of its own, and this is the part of the story that makes the cannabis pyramids genuinely cruel. In a classic scam, the victim is robbed by a stranger. In a multilevel scheme, the victim is enrolled by his brother-in-law, his coworker, his gym trainer—people who are themselves victims, who genuinely believe, because they have received that first payout. The trust that ordinarily protects a person from fraud becomes the channel through which fraud is distributed. And when the system collapses, the same mechanism works in reverse: the shame of having brought in one’s family and friends is among the chief reasons victims never go to the police. The numbers bear this out—in one British study, a fifth of fraud victims never reported the crime out of sheer embarrassment, and large majorities describe lasting stress and anxiety. The pyramid’s architecture provides its own omertà.
How big can such a thing get? The benchmark case is JuicyFields, the largest cannabis pyramid yet uncovered in Europe. The platform operated from early 2020 until July of 2022 and offered the genre in its purest form: stakes in medical-cannabis plants that, for the investor, existed only as entries on a dashboard; projected returns of thirty-odd per cent per cycle; a generous referral structure. The marketing was almost defiantly public—sponsorship of the industry’s biggest trade fairs, influencer campaigns, offices in Berlin. When the platform froze withdrawals, the tally stood at roughly five hundred and fifty thousand registered users, of whom a hundred and eighty-six thousand had actually transferred money, and losses estimated at six hundred and forty-five million euros at minimum—the true figure being unknowable because a large share of victims, for the reasons above, never reported. Where the money went is partly mapped: investigative reporting coordinated by CORRECTIV traced some four hundred and forty-six million euros through Cyprus-linked accounts, with a further hundred and ninety million moving through cryptocurrency exchanges.
The reckoning took two years. On April 11, 2024, Europol and Eurojust coordinated an operation, code-named Stoner, across eleven countries: thirty-eight searches in a single day, nine arrests, some nine and a half million dollars in bank accounts, cryptocurrency, cash, and real estate seized. Poland’s cybercrime bureau made an arrest in Lublin on a European warrant. A man identified as one of the scheme’s organizers, Sergei Berezin, was detained in the Dominican Republic and extradited to Spain that August, facing charges of aggravated fraud, money laundering, and membership in a criminal organization; a second suspect was surrendered by Estonia. The prosecutions are ongoing in several countries, and they established something larger than their own case files: European law enforcement now treats the plant-ownership-plus-recruitment model not as a business that failed but as transnational organized crime—with the joint investigation teams, mutual legal assistance, and cross-border asset freezes that the designation brings.
The legal anatomy, viewed from a prosecutor’s desk, is a layered thing. The foundation is fraud, and the deception operates in both directions—through action (the invented certifications, the “guaranteed harvests,” a phrase that should end any conversation about agriculture) and through silence (the unmentioned shell-company origins, the minimal share capital, the absence of any license to take the public’s money for investment). Courts in Poland, as elsewhere, have long held that concealing a material fact is the legal equivalent of stating a falsehood, and that the victim’s gullibility is no defense; the law protects the credulous, too. Poland, it should be said, has its own benchmark here: the Amber Gold pyramid, which between 2009 and 2012 relieved more than eighteen thousand clients of roughly eight hundred and fifty million złoty, ended with its organizer sentenced to fifteen years—proof that the country’s courts will hand down serious time when a pyramid case reaches them. A 2023 amendment raised the stakes further: fraud involving property above five million złoty is now a felony carrying three to twenty years, and above ten million, five to twenty-five. Above the fraud sits money laundering, and here the cannabis schemes are practically pedagogical: deposits enter through the operating company’s account; payouts to investors flow, curiously, from a different company altogether; and shortly before the inevitable bankruptcy, the assets migrate to a jurisdiction outside Europe, where they begin a second life as the legitimate proceeds of agriculture. When the bankruptcy trustee finally opens the books, the estate of a company that collected tens of millions contains, with eerie consistency, nothing at all.
Which is why the civil courts are, for victims, mostly a mirage. You cannot recover money from an empty estate. The path that remains runs through criminal law—against the individuals, the directors and organizers, with claims for restitution attached to the prosecution and freezing orders laid on whatever personal assets can be found, on however many continents they have been scattered across. The quality of the initial criminal complaint matters more than victims tend to assume. A complaint that merely describes one’s own deposit invites a shrug; a complaint that reconstructs the mechanism, documents the chronology of revenues against payouts, names the accounts and the affiliated entities, and points investigators toward parallel proceedings abroad is the difference, often enough, between a declined case and an investigation with assets frozen.
One final caution belongs in any honest account of this subject. After every large pyramid collapses, a second wave of predators arrives: “recovery agencies” and freelance “hackers” who, for an upfront fee, guarantee the return of lost funds. This is the recovery scam—fraud’s afterlife, preying exclusively on people who have already been robbed once. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic warn that these operators buy “sucker lists” of victims, sometimes from the original fraudsters themselves, and that their signature moves are the advance “retainer,” the demand for payment in crypto or gift cards, and the advice—always the advice—not to involve the police. No honest firm guarantees recovery from a Ponzi scheme, and none charges an “activation fee” to release money it claims to have located. The grams on that dashboard never existed. Neither does the fund the recovery man has found.
The cannabis pyramids will not be the last incarnation of the form. The scheme migrates wherever three conditions align: a genuinely booming market, a regulatory fog, and an asset that photographs well. What the JuicyFields prosecutions demonstrated is that the model has lost its novelty for the people whose job is to dismantle it—and that every victim’s complaint, filed early and built properly, becomes a brick in a case file that sooner or later turns into an indictment. The plant was never there. The defendants, increasingly, are.
Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.
One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).
Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.
He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.
