VANCOUVER — It was more than three years ago when Vancouver police arrested a man after he was seen using multiple bank cards to make withdrawals at an ATM. A search revealed he was carrying 66 bank cards and $39,200 in cash. The strange discovery in March 2023, described in an affidavit by an RCMP cyber crime investigator, would set off a chain of events leading to a years-long probe into nationwide illicit online sales of cannabis and hallucinogenic mushrooms.
The investigation by RCMP with the help of FINTRAC, Canada’s money laundering watchdog, untangled a web of numbered companies and bank accounts used to allegedly collect, move and disguise the funds. government’s Director of Civil Forfeiture alleging in a lawsuit that a “criminal organization” is behind the websites, no one named as a defendant in the case has faced criminal charges, and the websites targeted by investigators remain online offering a wide range of cannabis and psilocybin products. The director instead filed a lawsuit in March 2026 seeking to seize funds from the holders of accounts where the money allegedly ended up.
Three account holders are accused of being “directly involved” in laundering the alleged drug funds in the affidavit by Sgt. Robin Critchley in support of the lawsuit. Critchley describes how money from buyers off the websites would move through a multistage process, starting with an electronic money transfer.
“Once customers have selected and purchased the illicit products online, they are provided with an email to send an EMT to before they can receive the illicit products,” Critchley says. “The controller receiving the EMTs can choose which bank account to receive the funds, typically going into various federally incorporated company accounts, then transferred into individuals’ personal banking accounts.” The trio of account holders — married couple James Sherbuck and Rosa Mohammadi, and Noah Eves — are accused by the government of transferring more than $1.5 million generated from the illicit sales between November 2024 and January 2026, utilizing “thousands” of electronic money transfers to dozens of accounts. Sherbuck and Mohammadi filed a response to the lawsuit denying the funds were from unlawful activity, and Mohammadi hung up when reached by phone.
Eves, a 23-year-old who has claimed to be a sound engineer, did not respond to email and voicem…
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