My Scopolamine Experience in Medellin Colombia – Discussion with a Lawyer

Jun 20, 2026 | Private List update

A few weeks ago in Colombia I got “scoped” in a Medellin bar and was subsequently kidnapped.

Scopolamine is a drug administered covertly by criminals to disable victims for the purpose of robbery. I disappeared for a bit over 36 hours before waking up battered and bruised in a public hospital with my personal bank accounts drained and limited recollection of what happened.

In this video with my lawyer Alan, I explain what happened, share some key learnings and what the best way forward is if this happens to you or someone you know.

We can’t go into too much detail as there is an ongoing investigation.

https://youtu.be/PuB_BpEfi8c?si=_T7MobGdugmsHAuC

My Scopolamine Experience in Medellin Colombia – Discussion with a Lawyer (https://youtu.be/PuB_BpEfi8c?si=_T7MobGdugmsHAuC)

Most importantly, I’m fine

People regularly overdose on these drugs, and by all accounts I was given a pretty strong dose. This story could have easily had a worse ending, but all is well.

I’m currently enjoying life in Europe with my family.

I cherish life more than ever. God Bless.

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Transcript of “My Scopolamine Experience in Medellin Colombia – Discussion with a Lawyer”

LADISLAS MAURICE: Hey everyone, you know I’m all about being on the ground, and I’m going to be authentic with you. This is something that happened a bit over three weeks ago. I’m fine now, I recovered, but essentially, I got scoped in Colombia. I was kidnapped for a number of hours, and then I disappeared for a bit over 36 hours. The criminals used my face ID, my PIN, my 2FA, all of that to get access to some of my personal bank accounts and take some money, and I eventually woke up in some public hospital, all bruised up, not remembering anything whatsoever.

Scopolamine is a drug based on a plant that is found in Latin America, and essentially, people put it in your drink, in your food, or they can also blow it in your face. I’ve talked about cartel activity in the past in Mexico, and this is something that happens in Colombia, unfortunately, you know, happened to me. Does it mean that I’ll stop going to Colombia? Absolutely not. But it’s just something that you need to to be aware of and what you’re going to watch now is a video with my lawyer, Alan, in Colombia, and we’re discussing the case. We can’t go into too much detail because there’s an ongoing investigation. But yeah, I’m fine, had some stitches and stuff here, so I’ll probably have a scar for a while in the in the next videos. So I’ll I don’t know, I’ll have to address this or not, I’ll see how it develops.

How I got robbed and scoped in Medellin

LADISLAS MAURICE: Hello everyone, from beautiful Medellin. In case you didn’t notice, he got scoped. I’m here with my attorney, Alan, who’s helping me through the whole process. So Alan, you have quite a few clients that got scoped here in Medellin.

It’s not just a Colombian thing. It’s originally from Colombia, but it’s now all over Central America. It’s in big time in Barcelona, it’s in Miami. It can happen at a bar near you. Essentially, he was with friends at a bar for a birthday, and someone put something in my drink, and then I disappeared for what, close to 48 hours?

ALAN: Oh, yeah. Let me tell you how I saw this whole thing from my perspective, and then let’s talk to these guys about, you know, what it means, what to do about it, uh, and all that. Um, so here’s how it went down for me.

And you might not see this on his website immediately, but, no, Ladislas was here, literally, in my apartment, six days ago, I want to say, maybe two days before this happened to him. We recorded some content, we said hello, we, you know, we, we chatted for a little bit. And that was it. And then you were off to do your thing. The day that I heard about this, do you know how I heard about, do you know how?

No, so here’s what happened. It’s like 5:00, 5:10 a.m. local time. I usually get up around 5:30 right around there, and I just like every one of us, we take our phone and we we’re looking, and I’m looking at my WhatsApp feed, and I have like six separate messages from different people. And there’s this person I don’t even know, who happens to be your wife. And everyone is worried because they haven’t heard from you. And everyone is just thinking the worst. And everyone is calling me because not only am I your lawyer, I mean, you know, our law firm is fairly well-known because we’re so prominent, we we just happen to have experience in stuff like this, unfortunately.

So, basically, it was me in my underwear, managing, sort of, this situation, trying to calm down your family, your friends, and all that, it was just nuts. And we were like Defcon 5 for a while, then 4, then 3, then we were like at 1. And right around 9:00 in the morning, when we were ready to kind of just go all out, and all out really meant like let’s fully go straight to all the decision makers in Colombia, politicians, police, just key people, which is usually the go-to for something like this, you show up. Not, not here, but where you were staying. And I hear that news, and it, like, everyone just breathes this huge sigh of relief because, uh, in a second we’ll talk about it, but this could have gone a different way. Now, you tell us a little bit of of what happened and and, you know, how did this happen? I mean, what do you remember?

LADISLAS MAURICE: Uh, I remember uh, having drinks, and uh, and then at some point, I remember falling down, and then, at some point, I remember being in a hospital where they’re doing a head scan of me, and then I remember at some point waking up screaming because they’re doing stitches. And then on the Monday morning, and I was out Saturday night, right? And on the Monday morning, two ladies come and just take me out of the hospital. I was never given a bill or anything. I I was treated for free. And then they brought me to back to where I’m staying. Two lovely ladies who had initially found me, it turned out, um, on the street somewhere, I had again fallen down. What the perpetrators did was take my private phone, my personal phone, and use Face ID, all of that to access a bunch of my bank accounts. Um, so I’ve been spending all week with all the banks trying to secure everything. Um, we’re still trying to count the damage. It’s not too bad. Uh, I don’t know, I I can’t put a full figure on it because we haven’t assessed everything, but it will be between 30 and 50K.

What is scopolamine?

ALAN: I have a question for you. So, you know, you’re obviously a pretty savvy guy. You travel all the time. Colombia, I mean, even though this happened here, is by far not the most dangerous place on the planet. It really isn’t. You’ve been to worse places, as I understand. So, how do you think this could have happened, and why, like, how did it work this way for you, you being so sophisticated, knowing about your surroundings and all that, what do you think happened here?

LADISLAS MAURICE: I was, uh, you know, I had a beer bottle and I covered it with my finger. Somehow, in the supply chain, it went in there. Um, or again, this thing also gets blown into people’s faces, right?

ALAN: Right. So some background for people, and you guys can just Google this, you’ll see it, this substance is really strange. It’s, it induces this weird state where you can be conscious. You can actually be alert, or or appear to be alert, you’re interacting with the world with people, but you’re no longer in control of your… of yourself.

LADISLAS MAURICE: So if someone tells you, ‘give me your phone, let’s make this transaction,’ then you might just do it.

ALAN: Right, right, right, right. And it’s, it sounds as crazy as that, really. What I’m getting at is, you know, you’re you’re pretty wise, sort of, savvy traveler guy, and, you know, this could happen to pretty much anyone. It’s very important, it’s not just Medellin, it’s just in some of these places, you want to be in a position where you’re with people you know, you’re not with people you don’t know, and you’re very careful, uh, as much as you can be, uh, on a regular basis. So, that’s that’s a very big point I want to make there.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah, I mean, uh, I’m 39, I’ve been traveling full-time really since the age of 18, went to probably some of the world’s most dangerous places, and uh, nothing I never got robbed, I never had anything, you know, eventually statistics catch up with you.

ALAN: Yeah.

LADISLAS MAURICE: That’s it, you know, it’s, you know, it’s there.

ALAN: I think this is probably that.

LADISLAS MAURICE: And is this going to stop me from going to the bar in Medellin? Like, no, like, you know, absolutely not, like. Am I going to stop coming to Colombia? Absolutely not. It’s just, uh, you know, it’s lesson learned and and move on.

ALAN: Yeah.

How to investigate a scopolamine robbery

LADISLAS MAURICE: Let’s discuss the process from from a legal point of view, how things go forward. Because because as your lawyer is working on my case, I had an initial thinking of what went down, but as he’s working on it, we’re we’re seeing that it’s actually quite different.

ALAN: Right, well, and that that goes to your state of mind and where you were a couple of days ago, right? So, that’s that’s why it’s important to to start with what these guys are doing, which is, I don’t want to get too much into the weeds, but for stuff like this, you want to be in a position to understand the facts. Because one thing is what you think, and another thing is like the actual hard facts. And everything starts with a chronology, right? So, our team is building a pretty comprehensive chronology as to where you were, who you were with, building it with digital fingerprints, photos, whatever we can get our hands on to understand exactly what happened, that lets us know not only what happened, but why it happened and who it happened with, which is the big one.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Going into all the Google data, uh, getting all the IP addresses, all of that, it’s very, very detailed.

ALAN: It’s very detailed. So, so the first thing is, we need to build a timeline because what you don’t want to do in a place like Colombia is just what maybe you and I would do, like, you know, you’d be doing this in Europe, and, you know, maybe, I definitely would be doing this in the U.S., I’d just go to the police station, file a police report.

LADISLAS MAURICE: We still haven’t been to the police, and it’s been what, five days, four days.

ALAN: We haven’t done that yet, yeah. Um, but there are strategic reasons in this case not to just automatically jump the gun. Uh, there are particular strategic steps that you want to take before you go, you know, all out on that. There will be at some point some filing, obviously. To me, the most important thing here, other than your health, right, is to figure out what your outcome is going to be. Um, unfortunately, you know, we’re not, as I mentioned earlier, we’re not ignorant to this issue, you know, we’ve had any number of clients that have become victims.

I want to be clear here, so, if I’m in New York, I’m in Chicago, I’m in, I don’t know, even London, you know, crime happens all the time, right? It’s just that it’s a different type of crime. The stuff that happens in New York is going to be different than the stuff that happens in Colombia, and this is just one of those, kind of, sexy things that people could potentially focus on, but it’s just a different type of crime.

But anyway, I think the the focus here is, unfortunately, that we have enough experience now. Uh, you know, I had an interview recently with the Rolling Stone magazine, and I told them very directly, this has become very visible the past several years, but not because it’s happening a whole lot more necessarily, it’s because Medellin is now in focus. It’s, it’s this destination that everyone goes to. This was happening 20 years ago.

LADISLAS MAURICE: I mean, it was a cool party.

ALAN: Yeah. Can’t you see, I mean, yeah, of course, I mean, like…

LADISLAS MAURICE: …I was having a lot of fun, yeah. It’s a fun place, I mean.

ALAN: The point is, this is now the center of Latin American culture, Medellin is the center. And people keep on coming and so, this stuff just gets magnified and whatever. Uh, the bottom line is, whenever this happens, what we want to do is figure out what the outcome is going to be. I have clients that all they want is to get their money back. You know, and sometimes, it’s like good luck, because of the way these guys operate, it’s challenging. Others just want justice, they want to be heard.

Should I report my scopolamine incident to the police?

ALAN: I have clients who, don’t ever, ever, ever want to report it. Uh, and, Ladislas, I want to commend you because you’re a pretty prominent guy, and this shows just what a great guy you are. I mean, you this happened, you’re owning up to it, and also, you’re showing your followers what you can do to mitigate, right? Uh, I think it’s a really honest, very sincere way to present not only your business, but just yourself. So, I want to commend you for that. But again, it just depends on what the outcome you want to have. And it’s literally us as as as lawyers sitting down with our clients and and just asking, ‘what do you want?’ And depending on what they want, we can then act upon that.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah, cool. Words of wisdom.

ALAN: Yeah, absolutely.

How to contact Alan for legal services in Colombia

LADISLAS MAURICE: So if you ever get scoped in Colombia, there is a link below. And, can you tell us a little bit about all your brochures for residency and real estate transactions here in in Colombia?

ALAN: Sure, so as background, even though we focus on this stuff for obvious reasons, you know, our main focus is just the standard business law firm stuff, you know, so you got the standard, uh, real estate investment stuff that we do, property development, business registrations, business expansion into the country, accounting, corporate accounting and personal for obvious reasons, uh, pretty much anything that a foreign investor would need.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah, and residency services.

ALAN: Absolutely.

LADISLAS MAURICE: So there are links below to all of Alan’s services and you can get brochures. So Alan, again, thank you so much for waking up at 5:00 a.m. in your in your underwear to talk to my wife.

ALAN: Yeah, no worries. That sounded strange but I was there for you. I was there for you always. I just want to make sure you knew that.It’s all good. Take care, guys.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Make sure to download my free ebook, ’12 Mistakes to Avoid When Investing in International Real Estate,’ which you can find on my website, link below, and feel free to follow me on Instagram @thewanderinginvestor. I look forward to hearing from you.

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