Was Grant Cardone Fanboy and TikTok star Samuel Onuha arrested in Dubai on major drug trafficking charges? Or was there a minor possession charge that Onuha hyperinflated into a major story in which he has ties to major figures in European organized crime? Or is the entire affair fake news designed to create a viral news story?

Samuel Onuha and his brother Reuben founded their Icon clothing brand which is based in Amsterdam. They depend on social media and follow Grant Cardone. People are asking questions about what happened in Dubai. Preliminary, yet unverified, reports claim the police raided Samuel Onuha’s residence and recovered a shockingly large amount of drugs he and his brother smuggled into Dubai.

Samuel Onuha on X writing about Grant Cardone: 

I was reading Grant Cardone’s “10X Rule,” and I realized my true potential was more than what I had allowed myself to believe…

If you want to achieve more, you need to keep seeking new strategies….

Samuel Onuha followed in the footsteps of Grant Cardone and began selling super-expensive success seminars to his fan base. Onuha also has the Cardone-required private jet, luxury cars, watches, and all of the other symbols of Cardone Super OT Havingness Powers.

And now, like Cardone, Onuha is being looked into by the authorities. Or at least these are the unverified claims being made. 

The Onuha brothers are Nigerians who were born in the Netherlands which is one of the major hubs of drug trafficking in Europe. The brothers then moved to Dubai but still maintain ties to the Netherlands.

Therefore, a possible new strategy for Samuel Onuha might be to hyperinflate what may be a small drug possession case into a story involving major drug trafficking tied to the Dutch crime lord Ridouan Taghi. These things have been alleged, but never substantiated, in stories about the purported arrest of the Onuha brothers.

Niko Vorobyov writing in Aljazeera about Ridouan Taghi in 2024: 

Dutch mob boss Ridouan Taghi and 16 accomplices have been convicted of six murders in a mass trial codenamed Marengo in the Netherlands. Taghi was acquitted on Tuesday of one of the killings, but handed a life sentence for the rest, concluding the years-long case… 

Taghi, Together with Irish, Italian and Bosnian drug traffickers, was considered part of a “super-cartel”, directing cocaine shipments to Europe. 

He was also blamed for a series of high-profile assassinations, including of the country’s top crime journalist Peter R de Vries, which rattled society, leading certain observers to dub the Netherlands a “narco-state”…

Before Taghi, the Netherlands’ most notorious narco-baron was Klaas Bruinsma.

Constantly wearing black suits and lecturing his men on the importance of a healthy diet earned him the nickname, “The Preacher”.

In the 1980s, he invested in Amsterdam’s Red Light District to launder his money, and kept photos of senior police officers in compromising situations.

Bruinsma was implicated in the murder of his own bodyguard, kickboxer Andre “Bulldog” Brilleman, for allegedly cheating him. Brilleman was beaten with bats, dismembered, shot in the head, encased in concrete then dumped in a river.

In 1991, Bruinsma was gunned down by a police officer-turned-hitman hired by a crew of ruthless Yugoslav mobsters…

“My thoughts on Taghi and his crew are the same as the old penoze bosses [the elder generation of Amsterdam criminals],” an anonymous source close to Amsterdam’s underworld and nightlife scene told Al Jazeera. “He has no principles. Shooting family members, uninvolved civilians – it’s too much. Of course, nothing [since Taghi] has changed and the same sorts [of individuals] are still bringing in powder.”  

There is not enough evidence at present to say anything definitive. What exists are social media allegations about the Onuha brothers being badass drug smugglers tied to Ridouan Taghi.

Did Samuel Onuha create a manufactured narrative to falsely associate himself with nefarious Dutch criminals? If so, he could later deny it and have the luster of a man and his brother who had to clear their good names.

There have long been rumors that Samuel Onuha has ties to the Dutch underworld in general and Ridouan Taghi in particular. Is Ohuna playing to these rumors?

Alternately, the Onuha brothers may have actually engaged in drug smuggling because they want, or need, the big money that comes from it. Some stories have the Onuha brothers smuggling in 250 kilos (550 pounds) of cocaine into Dubai, a country with some of the strictest drug laws in the world. Other stories report 250 grams which is one half of a pound. 

We await further details. 

One strategy used by dodgy social media influencers to create a scandal.  This comes under the concept that all PR is good PR because other content creators will create new content talking about you due to the scandal. This new content keeps an influencer in the spotlight and generates income for the content creators talking about the scandal. It is a win and win and is sometimes as scripted as professional wrestling. 

The media will often publish the stories from content creators without fact checking. This headline comes from a malware-laden garbage website:

Social Media Scandals involving influencers fall into a few categories:

1. A phony scandal. At the height of the pandemic, Grant Cardone made a video claiming he was going bankrupt and was facing arrest. Cardone said he made the video to get above the noise. This is grifting 101. Click here to watch the video Cardone made. 

2. An actual scandal driven by revenge or betrayal. There is speculation that the Ohuna brothers were arrested based on revenge: 

I heard Samuel Onuha got snitched by “businesswomen” that didn’t get paid.

Now that he’s locked up, everyone suddenly has the guts to talk.

The ecom space is full of nerds who only act tough when there’s no risk.

In my eyes, the ones talking now are no different than the…

— Ecombaba (@EcomBaba) March 3, 2025

3. A scandal involving an actual arrest. This recently happened to influencer and convicted felon Wes Watson who was arrested for assault at the gym where he works out. Another influencer showed up at the gym to challenge Wes to a fight. Watson and his crew gave the influencer a brutal beating for which Watson was later arrested. The entire fight between Watson and another influencer was conveniently filmed by the influencer who showed up to fight. Watson’s social media nemesis Johnny Bravo has covered the fight and arrest extensively and received well over one million views. 

4. All scandals generally include receipts: Emails, secretly recorded conversations and phone calls, texts, letters, and so on. A recent scandal in the anti-Scientology space involved a secretly recorded conversation. This tells us one of the parties secretly records spoken and telephone conversations. The other party admitted to having conned women in this secretly recorded conversation. Both parties are making videos about this scandal. Other parties are making content about the scandal. This recent scandal is financially profitable and attention-getting for the two grifters at the center of the affair. One of the grifters is a sex offender who also was arrested for selling weapons to an undercover FBI agent. He was convicted and then served time in prison for this gun crime. 

This recent scandal has also, like the other scandals and feuds, expanded the anti-Scientology space into periodic and bitter personality-driven online contretemps which are intertwined with the main goal of taking down the Cult of Scientology.

Bad blood; envy; feuds; accusations; character assassination; malice; whispering campaigns; OSA infiltration; grifters; psychos; sociopaths; and warring camps have always existed in the anti-Scientology space. These things are now magnified on social media. This is how free speech functions within movements that are open to anyone and public in nature. Even the Vegans have become militant and some even engage in violence.

What distinguishes the anti-Scientology community is that everyday people have the courage to fight, speak out against, and protest an extremely vicious and revenge-driven multibillion dollar cult that trafficks, robs, and destroys its victims. The context in which the anti-Scientology movement exists is a dynamic, fluid, and often intense environment.

In order to create ambiguity and dissension, OSA employs agents and manipulates targeted people to use as well-meaning dupes. OSA’s intelligence gathering activities and use of operatives is a given. However, this cuts both ways as the anti-Scientologist organically, and in an unpredictable manner, reports on Scientology on a 24/7/365 basis and is the beneficiary of leaks by under the radar Scientologists who are still in the Cult and have motives to help expose Scientology. OSA does not understand how deep the leaks go.

As documented by Laurens Tijssen on X, there is no hard evidence that the Onuha brothers were actually arrested or that an indictment against them has been handed down by the authorities in Dubai. And yet the stories of the purported arrest of the brothers has created a blizzard of sensational stories on Tiktok, Instagram, X, YouTube and in Nigerian media.