Calls mount to regulate ‘sham scammer’ whisky cask investment industry
Fresh investigations into fraudulent whisky cask investment schemes have shed light on the growing number of investors falling victim to scammers.
Victims have been conned out of millions of pounds in whisky cask investment scams, a new investigation by the BBC has found.
Police are now investigating three Scotch whisky companies over fraud allegations. The legitimacy of millions of pounds worth of investments is now under scrutiny.
Jay Evans, who is suffering from terminal cancer, invested £76,000 with cask investment firm Whisky Scotland, which turned out to be fraudulent.
“Those [investment] certificates are not worth the paper they’re written on, so basically those casks do not exist,” Evans told the BBC.
“They’ve made somebody who’s facing end of life at an early age, they’ve made it infinitely more difficult.”
Evans purchased seven casks from the company and was sent certificates signed by one of the company directors. She has since been told that it would take 25 years for her to recoup what she paid to scammers.
The victim, who has been suffering with terminal cancer since 2021, said: “I have to work. They’ve taken all the savings that I had and so I haven’t got a choice at the moment.”
Another victim spent more than £100,000 on casks from a company called Cask Whisky Ltd, which experts say were only ever worth a fraction of the price she paid.
An investigation into the firm found that Craig Arch, the company’s CEO, is actually Craig Brooks, a disqualified director and convicted fraudster.
In 2019, Brooks and his brother were jailed for defrauding 350 victims out of a total of £6.2m through cold calling, convincing them to invest in carbon credits and “rare earth metals”.
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Brooks is running another cask whisky company, Cask Spirits Global Ltd, under another false name, Craig Hutchins, according to the BBC.
Lack of regulation has enabled fraudsters and con artists to flood the cask investment market.
Industry bodies like the Scotch Whisky Association offer guidance on how to avoid cask investment fraud, but there is no central authority regulating or tracking cask ownership.
Whisky writer and Keeper of the Quaich Felipe Schrieberg launched website Protectyourcask.com in 2024 to combat cask investment scams.
He spoke to db last year about how to spot the red flags.
Ultimately, he warned people not to invest in casks if they don’t have the background knowledge to be able to do it safely.
“When you’re looking at buying a cask, the state of the market, the risks involved, and the knowledge needed to figure out how to really negotiate it safely mean that your average Joe Public really shouldn’t go into this,” he said at the time.
“This is an unregulated, highly risky market with bad faith actors looking to take advantage of people,” he warned.
In light of recent investigations, Schrieberg has hit out against the “sham scammer ‘industry’ that has screwed so many people over”, he said on LinkedIn.
The BBC has released an investigation, ‘Hunting the Whisky Bandits’, featuring reporter Sam Poling’s undercover look inside the world of scammers selling fraudulent investments in Scotland’s national drink.
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