In last few weeks I’ve noticed couple of investment platforms that are trying to get some credibility by associating themselves with Forbes. Is that a good idea? And how much does it cost? Let’s find out.

How much does it cost?

I guess you could get a discount, but here are the standard prices from a PR agency:

As you can see - prices range from $850 up to $9500, but considering that everyone knows the Forbes brand and might influence some investor decisions, it can pay off.

Is it a good idea to pay for a Forbes mention?

If you can afford only some random mention in an unrelated post or a post that says it is “sponsored“, then probably not. It looks ridiculous and might have the opposite effect.

Juicy Fields example

juicyfields.io is a shady website that offers investors to buy “plants“ and get high returns, it has many red flags and I would not recommend to invest there. But their CEO is featured in Forbes. Cool, right? This screenshot is from one of their PDFs:

Where does the Forbes link lead to? To a post about Bitcoin Halving. WTF? And here is the way how Alan was “recognized“ by Forbes:

Or take Alan Glanse, charity founder and CEO of the cannabis business JuicyFields for instance. During his Wall Street days, he bought 100 bitcoins from a colleague that urgently needed money in 2012. Then, he forgot about his bitcoin. It wasn’t until the parabolic price highs of 2017’s second bitcoin halving, that he realized that he had become an instant millionaire.

The story sounds like bullshit if you ask me. In 2012 Bitcoin’s price ranged from $5 to $13, and if a Wall Street guy “urgently needed money“, then selling 100 Bitcoin might get him $500-1300. What can you buy with that as a Wall Street guy? A hooker for 1 hour?

And it does not even match with his LinkedIn profile, where it says - Alan was working for biopharmaceutical company Merck in 2012. And even if all of that was true, then it is not really easy to “forget“ and still have access to Bitcoin 5 years later - during that time biggest crypto exchanges were hacked or closed, hardware wallets were not popular, so you had to store crypto on your computer. And not many people use the same computer for 5 years.

But the strangest thing of all - even if Alan had bought 100 Bitcoin in 2012, and was a millionaire in 2017 (and certainly today as well), why would he need or want to work for a small, shady investment platform as an employee? How many millionaires do you know that want to work for someone else? Alan owns 0% of Juicy Grow GmbH.

So if you ask me - do I want to invest in juicyfields.io after reading the Forbes post? No way. To me it looks like another red flag and it was not a big surprise for me to find out that juicyfields.es advertised fake partnerships (now removed from website):

How did I found about it? Just sent an email:

It was also not a big surprise to me to find more lies in juicyfieds.io:

There was a similar promise in their Terms and Conditions:

2.2 Juicy Grow provides growing management services to the User through partners and experts working on appropriate territories, that meet all the necessary technical and climatic requirements, including the licenses, which are also published on the Platform.

But when I asked about this in Telegram - why are these licenses not published in website, their representative “MoonVoyager“ at first ignored the question, but later tried to explain it away like this:

So I need to go to Berlin to see some papers… But it gets better. If you visit Terms and Conditions page, the 2.2 point is now removed. Great job, inspires much trust.

Dena Invest example

In this case it is not the CEO, but platform that is recognized by Forbes:

Ok, good, let’s check - how is Forbes recognizing Dena Invest? This time it is a whole article, but in a Latvian version of Forbes. How much did it cost? My guess - maybe 200-300 EUR.

Probably should have paid 100 EUR more and got that “this is paid article“ removed:

In short - another example, how to spend money to look more suspicious. Was that a good investment? Probably not. Maybe should have spent it on hiring 1 real team member instead of several fake ones:

Antonio Gomez - auto generated picture
Lina Weber - auto generated picture

Thanks to generated.photos for the pictures, but again - this approach does not inspire much trust.

Key takeaways

If you pay for a Forbes feature, put in some effort. Make it believable.
If you are cheap, avoid this stuff or consult with an expert. Otherwise you will waste money and maybe even get the opposite effect.
If an investment platform tries to get credibility by a Forbes mention, check for other potential issues and red flags. There could be many.

Gru's Plan Meme | Pay for a mention; Get recognized by Forbes; Get bad PR; Get bad PR | image tagged in memes,gru's plan | made w/ Imgflip meme maker

P.S. Join “High-risk investments“ Telegram group for an informal discussion.

Kristaps Mors

Featured in Forbes? How much does it cost?