The New Scam Investors Need To Avoid

Over the last five or six years, I invested in fine wine and whisky casks through a company in London. I had accumulated a nice collection of investable wines. In October 2025, I received an email from the wine investment firm stating that the company would soon be under new ownership. Then, a month later, an email arrived stating that the company had closed its doors. From that point, there was no further communication.

In February this year, I was contacted by a company that the UK court system had contracted to handle the liquidation of the holdings and investor accounts with the wine investment company. There have been communications from the liquidators, and I have submitted proof of my holdings.

The liquidators have communicated, understandably, that taking inventory of millions of dollars of wine, determining ownership, selling off the wine, and using the proceeds to settle with creditors and investors will take a very long time. I do not expect to get a large percentage of my original investment amounts.

Over the last few months, I have been getting emails from parties claiming to be the wine investment firm now, and promising that they can sell my wines and send me the proceeds. The emails look very official, and whoever sent them knows a lot about how much I had invested.    

A little research convinced me that the new communications are scams.

What has surprised me is the sophisticated level of the scams. The scammers have a lot of information, and they are telling a compelling story of what happened to the company and how they were making things right with investors.

One guy called me up and spent 45 minutes telling me about the status of my account and what I needed to do to get my investment money back. Two items raised my suspicions and confirmed it was a scam call.

One is that they knew the final value of my account, before the firm shut down, and they were promising to get the full amount back to me. I really doubt they could do that while dumping millions of dollars of wine into the market.

The final straw came when he asked for money up front so they could process the refund of my investment. They wanted $7,500. If you are going to be a scammer, be greedy.

My point in sharing this story is to make you aware that no matter how good the pitch sounds, if you are asked to pay now to get more back later, you can be assured it is a scam, and you will lose what you pay and never see anything out of it.