The Juicy Fields scam was never just limited to Europe. Indeed, from the beginning, the scam looked to South Africa in particular, for everything from cultivation plantations to new leadership.
In the last several months, this situation has become even stranger as people associated with the scam continue to work there, or make claims that they do, which have even now roped in local and established journalists.
The Juicy Fields Paid Press Effort
The Juicy Fields Dao is not going away, but rather continuing to generate false press and media. As of mid January, 2024, the scam has continued to perpetuate the myth that Willem van der Mewe, a South African citizen who briefly took over the firm as it was heading towards the first exit scam in July 2022, is the person who has scammed investors.
Van der Mewe is also partnered with the European-based Stefan Graf, who Juicy Fields has also variously claimed “stole” investor funds.
In now removed online video clips, Juicy Fields produced a roughly edited file which they placed online with clips of van der Mewe and four people from the South African cannabis industry who were asked to comment on what they thought of him.
We decided to contact these four cannabis industry insiders. The first to reply was a doctor in the medicinal cannabis field who claimed she had been interviewed for 4 hours by a film team from the eNCA which is a large TV news channel in South Africa. The one question about van der Mewe was clearly out of context and she did not understand why she was even asked about him. At the time, she was told about the Juicy Fields fraud and that investors were expecting van der Mewe to pay them back.
We also followed up with the eNCA film team. They in turn told us that they got paid to produce a documentary about the cannabis industry in South Africa by a Russian man who needed a translator. However after the Russians insisted on manipulation of the documentary and controlling the tone and the content, the eNCA film team decided to back out of the project.
The “Kidnapping” Of Anders
As usual, nothing is as it seems with the Juicy Fields scam. Nor does their propaganda ever seem to stop. As of February 6, 2024, this strange article appeared online in a respected news zine, written by a locally respected journalist who has even written for Bloomberg news.
Nothing in this story, about the supposed kidnap of Kekshin, makes any sense. We believe that Kekshin was kidnapped in Russia and is now likely dead. The journalist in this second story has also refused to answer any of our questions.
The Return of Juicy Fields Paid Media
As strange as this story is, here is the takeaway. Juicy Fields is still using paid media to promote its agenda. And real and respected journalists, as well as investors, can easily be taken in by these kinds of scams. The Cannabis Cowboys by German DW would have been purely focusing on the leads given by the criminals and give Luxborg alot of attention as they also are being manipulated to help the group behind Juicyfields agenda.
This is hardly the first paid media campaign put together by the masterminds behind the Juicy Fields scam. And we suspect it won’t be the last.