The Exit Risk: What Happens to Adam Howell's Partners When They Want Their Money Back

Everything else on this site examines whether Adam Howell's ventures were what he said they were. This article is about something different, and for anyone considering putting money in, it may be the more important question: what he does to partners who will not pay what he demands on the way out.

Most due diligence is forward-looking. Is the product real, is the team credible, is the market there. That is the right set of questions for an ordinary venture, because in an ordinary venture the worst realistic outcome is that you lose the money. The exit is unpleasant, it is expensive, and then it is over.

There is a documented record of what an exit from a partnership with Adam Howell actually looks like. It is not the loss of the money. It is what came after the money — a campaign that has now run for nineteen months, across twenty-three commissioned articles, containing ninety-four documented false statements, extending to the man's wife, his children, his friends, his business partners and every business he has ever been associated with, and escalating into criminal complaints to three separate police forces.

That campaign produced one conviction. It was not against the man being accused. On 28 August 2025 a Thai court convicted Adam Howell of criminal defamation. Three further criminal cases and one civil case remain pending against him — two of the criminal charges for making false accusations to police. He left Thailand for Dubai while those matters were outstanding, and he is now soliciting investment again.

The Two-Minute Version

If you read nothing else, read this. It is written for someone who has been approached, has a meeting this week, and needs to know what to ask.

What you would actually be underwriting

Not just the venture. You would be entering a commercial relationship with a person whose documented response to a failed partnership was a sustained, funded, multi-platform campaign against the other parties — one that continued for well over a year, that was extended to family members on purpose, and that resulted in a criminal conviction against him rather than against his target. He has a history of attacking former partners online: one has now been under attack for seven years and counting.

This is a category of risk that ordinary due diligence does not price, because ordinary counterparties do not present it. It does not appear on a cap table. It appears afterwards.

The exit risk, in numbers

• 19 months — duration of the campaign against one former business partner, from 17 December 2024 to the present, still running.
• 23 articles — commissioned pieces published about that man by a single writer, across two websites.
• 94 — separately documented false statements of fact catalogued across those articles.
• 0 — occasions on which the target was contacted for comment before publication.
• 0 — times that man has been arrested, charged, interviewed, summoned or cautioned by any police force, in any country, arising from any complaint Adam Howell has made about him.
• 3 police forces — the number to which substantially the same allegations were submitted across roughly two years, producing no charge.
• 1 conviction — criminal defamation, 28 August 2025, against Adam Howell.
• 3 criminal + 1 civil — cases still pending against him, two of the criminal charges for making false accusations to police.

Eight questions to put to him — and what a truthful answer sounds like

1. Have you ever been convicted of a criminal offence in any country? A truthful answer discloses the 28 August 2025 Thai criminal defamation conviction without being asked twice.
2. Are there proceedings outstanding against you anywhere? A truthful answer discloses three criminal cases and one civil case pending in Thailand, and says what they are about.
3. Why did you leave Thailand, and when? A truthful answer connects the departure to those proceedings rather than describing it as a relocation for business reasons.
4. Has any previous partnership of yours ended in litigation? Ask for all of them. Ask for the names. Then ask whether you may contact those people — and note carefully what happens to the conversation when you do.
5. Have you ever paid a journalist, writer or publisher to produce coverage about a person you were in dispute with? This is the question that matters most, and it is the one this record answers in his own written words.
6. Have you ever made a report to police about a former business partner? How many, to how many forces, and what came of them? Compare the answer with the fact that two of the criminal charges currently pending against him concern making false accusations to police.
7. Name a venture you have taken from start to a completed, profitable exit. Not a launch. Not a market cap. A completed outcome that returned money to the people who put it in. Ask for one, and ask to speak to the investors in it.
8. If this venture fails and I ask for my money back, what happens? Ask it directly, in front of a witness, and write the answer down.

None of these questions is aggressive. Every one of them is a question an ordinary founder answers in a sentence. Watch what happens to the temperature of the meeting when they are asked.

What Actually Happened

The rest of this article is the narrative behind those numbers. It is sourced throughout to documents that are published in full and that anyone can check — court records, his own written messages, and the published words of the writer he paid.

The investment, and the dispute

Adam Howell — a Canadian national, born 2 March 1982 — invested in a Thailand-based hospitality group — bars — in which the British businessman Bryan Flowers was a founder and investor. The venture did not deliver the return Howell expected during the COVID shutdowns. He wanted to exit, and was offered a fair buy-out of 3 million baht — a reasonable figure for a business that was still half closed.

What he asked for instead did not stay still. He first demanded 55 million baht. Within days that became 110 million baht. By the time he was sitting in court on the defamation case brought against him, he was demanding 155 million baht— roughly eleven times his original investment.

That escalation is worth pausing on, because it is the tell. A figure that trebles in the space of a dispute, while the underlying business has not changed and is still shut, is not a valuation. It is a price being set by how much pressure the other side is under — which is the same logic as the campaign that followed.

That much is unremarkable. Commercial disputes are ordinary, and they are resolved in ordinary ways: negotiation, mediation, and if necessary a civil court. What distinguishes this case is not that a dispute arose. It is what was done instead of resolving it.

The demand

In Facebook Messenger exchanges later published in full, Howell described his own approach in writing:

"I told them pay me 155m baht or I would send Drummond after them, I even got Drummond to edit his first article to say they are guilty. I told him I will give him a percent."

Read the structure of that sentence rather than its temperature. It describes a demand for money, a threat of press coverage if the money is not paid, and the writer being directed to alter an already-published article to state guilt. It also offers that writer a percentage of the payout — an offer, in the future tense; no percentage was ever paid, because no payout ever materialised, and we say so here rather than let it be inferred.

Commissioning the coverage

"Drummond" is Andrew Drummond, a British former journalist who left Thailand in January 2015 — by which time he already carried two Thai criminal defamation convictions, with further legal proceedings outstanding that contemporaneous Thai press treated as a major factor in his departure — and has published from outside the country since. On Howell's own account, he was selected for a specific quality:

"He says he just needs one person to says its true and he don't check."

"He's the only one willing to attack without asking questions."

And on the extension of the campaign to the target's family:

"It was Drummond's idea; he likes getting family involved. I paid him extra to drag Bryan's family and friends into it, all, he has no ethics at all."

Later, on the arrangement running out of money:

"I can't afford to pay Drummond anymore, he says he did it cheap because he's been after Bryan for years."

The writer has separately confirmed the sourcing himself. In an article published on 2 December 2025 he wrote: "we were contacted by Howell who unloaded his files." A follow-up published on 28 July 2026 rests, in his own description, on "Howell's records" — and describes Howell to readers only as a "defrauded investor", mentioning neither the conviction, nor the pending cases, nor the departure from Thailand.

Nineteen months

What followed has not stopped. Between 17 December 2024 and the present, twenty-three original articles have been published about Bryan Flowers by that writer, containing ninety-four separately documented false statements of fact. Not one of those articles was preceded by a request for comment. Not one false statement has been retracted or corrected.

The allegations escalate through essentially every serious crime available: human trafficking, child trafficking, drug offences, money laundering, running an organised crime group, perjury, bribery of police and judges, and — most recently — links to online child sexual abuse material.

Bryan Flowers has never been arrested, charged, interviewed, summoned or cautioned by any police force, in any country, in relation to any of it. Not once, at any time. That is a higher threshold than the absence of a conviction. It means that across multiple reports, to multiple forces, over a period of years, nothing submitted ever reached the point at which a single question was put to the man being accused.

The campaign was not confined to one writer's websites. It was amplified across Quora, Reddit, Facebook, X and TripAdvisor, and through a channel of some eighty-five videos. Where a business had a review page, the allegations arrived there. Where a partner had a public profile, they arrived there too.

Fabricated material

Among the material circulated were chat screenshots presented as conversations involving Bryan Flowers. On examination, these break into two categories: real messages written by other people and falsely attributed to him, and at least one screenshot with no genuine original at all.

This matters for a prospective investor more than it might first appear. A dispute in which one side exaggerates is common. A dispute in which one side manufactures documentary evidence is a different category of counterparty risk entirely — because the same capability, once demonstrated, is available to be used against anyone.

Using the police as an instrument

Substantially the same allegations were submitted to three separate Thai police forces across roughly two years: letters to Pattaya police and Bangkok police in 2024 alleging drug smuggling, gang association and the sale of child sexual abuse material, and a letter to the Commander of the Anti-Human Trafficking Division presenting Howell as a "confidential informant" and requesting the dismantling of a "criminal network".

Every one of those was assessed by officers with the jurisdiction to act, the resources to investigate, and no reason whatever to protect the man being accused. None produced a charge. None produced an interview.

Those reports are now themselves the subject of prosecution: two of the criminal charges currently pending against Adam Howell concern making false accusations to police, in two separate jurisdictions.

The Telegram screenshots

The most recent escalation, in July 2026, is the most serious, and it is worth setting out carefully because it turns on evidence the writer published himself.

Two articles alleged that Bryan Flowers held a "secret Telegram account" belonging to groups trading child sexual abuse material, illustrated with screenshots. Six things about those screenshots are established from the writer's own published words:

1. The material came from Adam Howell. The writer has said so twice, in his own articles.
2. His own article states that Howell showed police "groups he was in".
3. He described the images as "two of many scans taken over two years", and wrote that "considerable other material has been obtained including images".
4. On 26 July he certified "No laws have been broken in the process". On 28 July, explaining why his investigation went no further, he wrote "It is illegal to join these groups". Those cannot both be true.
5. His own caption beneath the two published images reads: "Both contain adult porn and drugs groups but only the [identifier redacted here] group shows groups with child sexual abuse material." By his own description, one of the two contains no such material at all.
6. The username shown is not Bryan Flowers' username. He has one Telegram account. Its handle is identical to his LINE handle, chosen when he opened both applications, never changed on either, and the account is open today. It is not the handle in the screenshots.

Set those together. The account bearing Bryan Flowers' name in those images is not his account. A screenshot of the inside of a group can only be taken by someone inside it. And the person who supplied the images, on the writer's own repeated account, was Adam Howell — the same man his article describes as having shown police "groups he was in".

The conclusion we draw, and state plainly as a conclusion rather than as a proven fact, is this: the account presented to readers as Bryan Flowers' was operated by somebody else, and on the writer's own account of where the material came from, that somebody was Adam Howell.

We set out equally plainly what would settle it. Whether two accounts are operated by the same person can only be established from platform-side records — registration data, the telephone number an account was created with, device identifiers, IP history. Telegram holds those records and releases them to law enforcement on legal process. Neither Adam Howell nor the writer has produced anything of the kind, and no scrape, screenshot or assertion can substitute for it. Should either of them wish to refute the conclusion above, the means to do so exists and is available to them.

We make no assertion about what any of those groups actually contained. We do not need to. Whichever way that question resolves, it does not resolve in Adam Howell's favour: either the groups were what he says they were, in which case his own supplier account places him inside them for two years while reporting nothing to anyone — or they were not, in which case he manufactured an allegation of child sexual offending against a man with young children and fed it to a writer he was paying.

The conviction, and the departure

On 28 August 2025, a Thai court convicted Adam Howell of criminal defamation and imposed a six-month suspended sentence. The proceedings had been brought by Bryan Flowers; Howell had received his first court notice in August 2024.

Three further criminal cases and one civil case remain pending against him on the same facts: two charges of making false accusations to police in two jurisdictions, one cyber-crime charge, and a civil defamation claim. In early 2026, before the civil matter was determined, he left Thailand for Dubai, leaving substantial personal debts behind him.

He now presents publicly from Dubai as a cryptocurrency founder and blockchain pioneer, on a professionally built personal website that solicits investment. That site names the ventures. It does not mention Thailand, the conviction, the pending cases, or the reason he left.

The pattern behind the ventures

This site has documented his commercial record separately and at length — DopeCoin, Smoke Exchange, SuperDoge and the ventures around them. We will not repeat that here beyond one observation relevant to this article's subject.

Across more than a decade of ventures, we have not been able to identify a single one that reached a completed, profitable outcome returning money to the people who funded it. What we can identify is a consistent pattern in how money arrives: from investors, at the beginning, on the strength of a pitch. That is the part of the cycle that has repeatedly worked.

We state that as the limit of what we can establish rather than as an absolute. If a completed, profitable venture exists, we will publish it — see the right of reply below.

Why This Is Addressed To You

If you are reading this because you have been approached in Dubai, or online, or through an introducer, the specific thing we want you to take from it is not that a venture failed. Ventures fail constantly and that is not, by itself, a warning about anybody.

The warning is narrower. It concerns what a documented pattern says will happen at the moment you decide you want your money back, or you decline to put more in, or you raise a question he does not want raised in front of other investors.

On the record set out above, that moment is when the risk begins: not the loss of the investment, but a campaign against your name, your family and every business you are associated with, conducted through a paid writer and amplified across every platform on which you can be found — and, if the pattern holds, complaints to police alleging serious criminality that no force has ever been able to substantiate.

That is a risk you can price only if you know it exists. Most people who have been approached do not. That is the entire purpose of this article.

What This Article Does Not Say

We think a warning is worth more when it is precise about its own limits, so here are ours.

• We make no assertion about the contents of any Telegram group, and none should be read into anything above.
• The conclusion that the account presented as Bryan Flowers' was operated by Adam Howell is a conclusion we have drawn from the writer's own published account. It is not a finding of any court, and we have set out above exactly what evidence would settle it.
• The percentage offered to the writer was an offer, in the future tense. No percentage was paid, because no payout materialised.
• The cases pending against Adam Howell are pending. He has not been convicted in any of them, and nothing here should be read as suggesting he has.
• We do not name Bryan Flowers' wife or children anywhere in this article, notwithstanding that both were targeted, and we will not.

Right of Reply

Adam Howell is invited to respond to anything in this article. If he can produce a completed, profitable venture that returned capital to its investors, we will publish it. If he can produce platform records establishing who operated the Telegram account attributed to Bryan Flowers, we will publish those and correct this article accordingly. If any date, figure or quotation here is wrong, we will correct it and say that we have.

That offer is open, it is not time-limited, and it is more than has ever been extended to the man he has spent nineteen months accusing.

The full documentary record of the campaign described here — including every article, every catalogued false statement, and the underlying documents published in full — is maintained at drummondhowellcampaign.com.