Chapter 2
Narrative manufacturing
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Over the following months, the first visible signs of a broader, increasingly coordinated campaign targeting Ventus Energy began to emerge publicly.
…And we did not have to wait long.
As early as autumn 2025, the first visible public signs of coordinated reputational pressure targeting Ventus Energy began to emerge.
The warm-up phase
In October 2025, fake Trustpilot reviews began appearing systematically. Some of these reviews were unrelated to the company’s actual operations or lender experience and instead appeared to focus on creating a broader negative perception of the company.
By November 2025, the first openly tendentious “analysis” videos targeting Ventus Energy began appearing online.
On November 12, 2025, a French financial YouTube creator published a highly negative video about Ventus Energy.
Rather than escalating the situation publicly, we attempted to engage constructively. We contacted the creator directly, pointed out factual inaccuracies and invited him to clarify misleading statements presented in the publication. We also offered an open discussion regarding the claims made in the video. Despite multiple attempts at communication, our outreach was ignored.
On December 10, 2025, another French-language YouTube account published a new negative video regarding the company. The account itself appeared highly unusual — the channel had been created only recently, had no meaningful subscriber base, and multiple indicators suggested that the content was AI-generated.
This strongly indicated that the account had been created with a very specific purpose — to amplify and distribute negative narratives targeting Ventus Energy.
From mid-November 2025 onwards, negative “analytical” articles and videos containing largely identical key accusations began appearing with remarkable regularity — on average at least once every two weeks.
Acceleration phase
At the same time, a new and much more systematic phase of the campaign began to emerge through publications by Karsten.
On December 2, 2025, Karsten published the first major article targeting Ventus Energy. Over the following months, a continuous stream of articles, posts and commentary repeatedly attempted to associate Ventus Energy with unrelated controversies, historical disputes and negative assumptions.
During the early stages of these accusations, Ventus Energy actively provided clarifications, factual explanations and supporting information. However, many of those responses were either ignored, selectively interpreted or reframed into new negative narratives.
One of Karsten’s public accusations towards Ventus Energy involved alleged document falsification. At the same time, however, the author himself repeatedly modified and adjusted his own publications after Ventus Energy publicly challenged factual inaccuracies contained in them. In several cases, these edits and narrative adjustments were made without a transparent indication that changes had been introduced, while the overall tone of the publications remained openly negative.
Karsten’s first publication was distributed particularly widely. According to information available to us and communications later obtained by Ventus Energy, the materials were actively distributed not only to industry participants but also to media representatives, regulators, financial institutions, individuals connected to the broader Baltic energy sector and persons believed to be potential Ventus Energy lenders.
At the same time, lawyers began reaching out to the community under the premise of searching for potential “victims” connected to Ventus Energy.
Additional articles and videos continued to appear throughout December 2025 and the following months, often repeating similar talking points, many of which were factually incorrect, while disregarding publicly available information, company clarifications, and explanations from independent experts.
A particularly illustrative example followed on December 30, 2025. After independent auditors had completed and published their fact-check review regarding Ventus Energy, the review itself was publicly dismissed and ridiculed rather than objectively analysed.
This was especially noteworthy because Karsten had previously demanded that Ventus Energy publicly disclose contracts and commercially sensitive information, arguing that otherwise the company’s statements amounted to “trust me Bro” claims. However, when an independent audit fact-check review was later published, its conclusions, methodology and underlying data were immediately questioned and publicly discredited.
“Keep it warm” phase
Throughout early 2026, the pattern continued, with the same core talking points repeatedly amplified.
On March 5, 2026, Karsten published an article regarding Jānis Timma and the Crowdestate platform. Although the article itself was not directly related to Ventus Energy’s operations, Ventus Energy was referenced 17 separate times throughout the publication.
On March 6, 2026, another article regarding Jānis Timma and Crowdestor followed, again repeatedly referencing Ventus Energy despite the company not being the central subject of the publication.
With “two-week” intensity, the campaign continued on March 22, 2026, an additional article regarding stock option holders was published.
Throughout the campaign, the same group of commenters continuously amplified these narratives across several Telegram groups, artificially maintaining a constant negative information environment around the company.
Of course, the appearance of various “analytical” articles, opinions, and public commentary could be explained as increased interest in researching a new and fast-growing company. However, many of the events that occurred in parallel with these narrative-manufacturing activities suggest a very different picture.
Those events we describe in Chapter 3 / From Reputational Attacks to Business Sabotage.