On April 18, 2023, juicyfieldscase.com published the first article anywhere that named the people behind Europe’s largest cannabis fraud, with their real faces, alongside the earlier Polish recycling scam they had run first. On April 11, 2024, nine of them were arrested in coordinated operations across eleven countries.
359 days.
I founded that site.
I’m Daniel Johansson.
How I got here
I’m a JuicyFields victim. Like roughly 200,000 other people, I gave money to a company that pretended to grow medical cannabis and was instead running one of the largest investment frauds in European history. €645 million when the platform collapsed in July 2022.
Most victims walked away angry. A few of us decided not to.
I called Lars Olofsson, the Swedish lawyer with a track record of taking on cases other counsel wouldn’t. We talked. He called back the next day and said that ”This is the Russian mafia playbook”. We agreed the story would not investigate itself, that the official response, across multiple jurisdictions, was going to be slow, and that someone had to build the public record while it was still possible to gather it.
Lars would be the public face of the investigation. He’s a lawyer, he’s on the record on lawsuits, he could absorb scrutiny an anonymous publisher cannot. I would build and run the publishing apparatus. His name on every interview, every press release, every court filing. My name on victim coverage when journalists asked, never on anything connecting me to the website.
Nine days after JuicyFields collapsed, we launched the site.
What we actually did
Between July 2022 and today, juicyfieldscase.com has published more than a hundred articles in five languages. We were the publisher of record for the case before any major broadcaster caught up.
International press began citing us in August 2022. Deutsche Welle’s Cannabis Cowboys podcast aired in January 2023, six months after we’d been publishing daily. ZDF’s documentary aired in April 2023. Swedish Kalla Fakta picked it up that February. Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, and South African outlets followed.
I was named in some of this coverage as a victim and plaintiff. Sveriges Radio on what I personally lost in the scheme. TV4 on the civil case against the platform’s facilitators. SVT on the proceedings in Luleå district court. Never as the publisher of this site. That was the line we held.
In April 2023, we published the first article anywhere that connected JuicyFields to Recyclix, a 2015 to 2017 Polish ”recycled plastic” investment scam, run by the same people, that had pocketed an estimated €39 million from 25,000 to 35,000 victims. Same playbook. Same exit. Same network. Different industry.
That same article named the perpetrators by their real names, paired with their real faces. It was the first time those two things appeared together publicly. Until then the network had operated under aliases.
We had a source: an insider we referred to in our reporting as ”Anders.” His real name, now public, is Igor. He was the muscle and enforcer for JuicyFields. He came over to the investigation after being repeatedly threatened, in court via false claims, and personally via threats against his family. We protected him. We worked with him.
We brought him and the evidence he gave us to the Berlin Police. That became part of Operation Stoner, the cross-border investigation that on April 11, 2024 mobilised over 400 officers across 11 countries, executed 38 house searches, and arrested nine principals of the scheme. Europol and the British National Crime Agency announced the operation alongside the Berlin Prosecutor’s office. Our involvement, and Lars’s, was not mentioned in any of those press releases. That was fine.
We also brought Igor to Danish broadcaster DR, where director Boris Benjamin Bertram and producer Mikala Krogh built him into the centerpiece of The Russian Deception (Den Russiske Insider – Mafiaens Milliardbedrag), a feature documentary co-produced with SVT (Sweden) and YLE (Finland), premiered on DR on November 10, 2024, and since sold to more than twenty countries.
I’m not credited on that film. I don’t need to be. The documentary exists because we had Igor and brought him to DR.
In subsequent reporting we documented links from the criminal leadership to the German-Russian Rotary Club and to networks adjacent to the Russian state apparatus. In December 2023 we reported on a possible kidnapping connected to the scheme. In September 2024 an Estonian court approved the extradition of one of the principals to Spain.
Why I split the roles, and why not anymore
A reasonable question: if my name was already in some of the coverage as a victim, why never on anything connecting me to the site?
Three reasons.
First, this is a Russian-organised network. Igor was attacked. Witnesses were threatened. The kidnapping report in December 2023 was not hypothetical. Being one of two hundred thousand named victims is a different threat profile than being the named publisher of the only site that had connected the criminals to their faces. The first you can live with. The second is an invitation.
Second, the split worked. The site could name people with their faces, surface a protected witness, and run material that broadcasters were still legally hedging on, without presenting an individual target for retaliation.
Third, the legal posture mattered. Lars was, and is, running litigation. The investigation was upstream of his cases. Keeping publisher and counsel-of-record separate was hygiene.
What changed: nine of the principals are in custody. The Estonia to Spain extradition went through. The Russian state-network angle is in the documentary and on the public record. The April 2023 article identifying the perpetrators by name and face has held up across a year of arrests and proceedings.
We are past the point where keeping these two roles separate is the most useful thing I can do.
The investigation continues. Lars’s lawsuits continue. The facilitators (the lawyers, the social-media platforms, the celebrity influencers) are largely still unprosecuted, and we will keep publishing on them. That doesn’t require the split anymore.
What I’m doing now
After four years of writing about people who pretended to be in the cannabis industry, I have spent the last year building something legitimate in it.
I founded Helsama OÜ, a small Estonian company that processes hemp sourced from Gotland. Hemp powder, hemp seeds. There are no investment opportunities here, no offshore vehicles, no fictional growing facilities. Only a product, the people who buy it, and the work it takes to deliver one to the other.
I’m not asking anyone reading this to buy anything. I’m telling you what I did with the years on the other side of this case, because what does the legitimate version of this industry look like is a question I had to take seriously after four years describing what the illegitimate version looked like.
The people who deserve credit
Lars Olofsson, who took the calls, took the names, and took the public hit so the rest of the operation could keep working.
Igor, formerly known to readers as ”Anders,” who walked away from the worst people he knew and chose to talk on the record.
The journalists at DR, SVT, YLE, ZDF, DW, TV4, BNNVARA, Sydsvenskan, Der Spiegel, Correctiv, Zembla, elDiario.es, Público, insidestory.gr, and outlets across several languages, who eventually picked up what we had been publishing and brought it to mass audiences.
The victims who sent us evidence, gave testimony, joined the litigation, and refused to be quiet.
European law enforcement, finally.
And the readers who followed this site.
Now you know.
Daniel Johansson
