A carbon offsetting company called Green Home has set up offices in several cities in Peru. The company claims to be a “Global leader in sustainable living”, and offers “Green investment, driven by technology”. But the company comes with more red flags than a golf course.
We’ll look first at some of the company’s claims, followed by the red flags.
Here’s how the company describes what it does:
Our mission is to create interactive virtual forest ecosystems using an advanced artificial intelligence data platform to support and promote real-world forest conservation and carbon offset projects.
Green Home has set up a platform that it calls the “Carbon Neutral Metaverse Ecosystem”. Individuals and companies can join in by buying and maintaining trees in a virtual forest. Each tree in the virtual forest is supposed to correspond to “specific real-world forest protection or tree planting action”.
These “real-world” actions are carried out by Green Homes’ global partners.
Green Homes claims to have “attracted tens of thousands of users from around the world to participate”. It claims to have planted “hundreds of thousands of trees”.
Green Home claims to have a forest,
Approximately 20 miles southeast of Mount Shasta in Northern California lies a commercial forested area spanning around 9,000 acres, which is managed under a conservation easement granted by the Pacific Forest Trust (PFT).
And the company claims to have another project managed by Forest Investment Associates which generates carbon offsets from timber management in a 28,000 acre mixed hardwood and conifer swamp forest in Northern Wisconsin.
Time to have a look at some of the red flags raised by Green Home’s operations.
The company claims to be incorporated as Green Home Technology Environmental Protection SAC with its headquarters in Hong Kong. But a search on OpenCorporates reveals no such company in Hong Kong, or anywhere else.
The company gives its address as “8 Financial Street Central, Hong Kong”. That’s the location of the International Finance Centre, which is part of a development that includes the second tallest building in Hong Kong.
In a statement, Green Home writes,
We have legal multinational corporate qualifications in Hong Kong, and all corporate operations are jointly supervised by the government, banking regulatory authorities, financial institutions, and other parties, and are fully compliant and legal. All our business activities are supported by documents and evidence, not just empty words.
However, the company provides no documents or evidence to support this claim.
The initials SAC stand for Sociedad Anónima Cerrada which is a Peruvian type of company that must have at least two and not more than 20 shareholders. The company’s shares cannot be offered to the public or traded on the stock exchange.
On Google Play, where the company’s app can be downloaded, Green Home gives the address Jose Olaya J6b, Urb. Licenciados, Cusco 08000, Peru. However, Green Home does not appear in searches on several directories of companies in Peru.
The company claims to have registered a business licence and hold a tax clearance certificate in Peru:
Green Home claims to have 16 offices in Peru and one in Colombia.
Elsewhere, Green Home claims to be a Chinese company.
On its website, Green Home claims that the company was established in 2018, “originally as the Pew Global Center for Climate Change”.
This, obviously, is not true. The Pew Center on Global Climate Change, to give the organisation its correct name was founded in 1998. It is now called the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, or C2ES. It has no link whatsoever with Green Home.
Green Home’s team, according to the company’s website, consists of six people: Hu Liwei, Romanee, John, Jianhua Chen, Guofu Li, and Erin.
Hu Liwei apparently has “20 years of experience as an environmental and sustainability consultant”. Yet a search for “Hu Liwei” and “Sustainability” reveals nothing outside Green Home’s website and Facebook page. He is supposedly the founding vice president of the Greater Bay Area Carbon Neutrality Association, but his name appears nowhere on the Association’s website.
Jianhua Chen and Guofu Li have similarly elusive profiles outside Green Home’s website.
Green Home’s website features nonsensical Latin text — similar to “Lorem ipsum” which is commonly used as placeholder text. That’s not impressive, particularly for a company that claims to have been incorporated seven years ago, and is supposedly based in a prestigious office in Hong Kong.
While Green Home claims to have two forest projects, one covering about 3,600 hectares in California and one covering about 11,300 hectares in Wisconsin, the company provides no evidence whatsoever that it is actually involved in either of these projects.
Green Home is not mentioned on either the Pacific Forest Trust’s or Forest Investment Associates’ websites.
REDD-Monitor has written to the Pacific Forest Trust and to Forest Investment Associates to ask them whether Green Home’s claims about these projects are genuine. Neither had replied when this article was published. I will update this post when they reply.
A video posted on TikTok by an account called Green Home Negocio answers the question “Where are the Green Home plantations located?” as follows:
In the United States, the Appalachian Mountains and Midwestern prairies have 200,000 acres.
In China, Inner Mongolia, and regions of the Northwest, there are 300,000 acres.
In Australia, New South Wales, and Queensland, there are 150,000 acres.
In Ethiopia, the Sahel region, there are 200,000 acres.
In India, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh, there are 200,000 acres.
In Peru, the Amazon region, there are 150,000 acres.
In Brazil, the Amazon rainforest, there are 200,000 acres.
Green Home provides no further details. No information about whether any third-party organisation verified the carbon credits or which carbon standard was used. Neither is there any information about the registry on which Green Home’s carbon credits are listed. And, obviously, there are no project names or project numbers, no developers, no auditors, and no project documents.
Green Home claims that “The cooperation between Green Home and International Carbon Exchange allows each user to earn carbon points and redeem them by participating in tree planting activities.”
International Carbon Exchange is a company incorporated in the UK on 8 May 2023. As of 31 May 2025, the company was dormant with the grand total of £1 in the bank.
Green Home is apparently hoping that people will confuse International Carbon Exchange with ICE, Intercontinental Exchange, Inc, the multinational financial services company with revenue in 2024 of US$9.3 billion.
Predictably enough, Green Home is planning to launch the “Green Home Coin” which will, according to the company, “enhance the circulation efficiency, transparency, and global value discovery of carbon credits through digital means”.
A total of 800 million “GH Eco-Coins” will be issued. The minimum subscription amount is US$200 — payable in USDT, the cryptocurrency stablecoin Tether.
Green Home’s crypto coin will be an unwelcome addition to a long list of iffy cryptocurrencies linked to equally iffy carbon markets.
In order to use the Green Home app, the company requires the National Identity Document number, full name, bank account details, and an email address.
Green Home offers several “forest funds” with different investment periods:
Earth Guardian Fund, 60 days, US$200 minimum;
Carbon Benefit Fund, 120 days, US$500 minimum;
Green Renaissance Fund, 270 days, US$100 minimum;
Ecosystem Fund, 1,095 days, US$500 minimum and US$9,999 maximum.
Green Home illustrates its forest funds as follows — under different names. Note the fixed returns. As Offshore Alert’s David Marchant noted more than 10 years ago, “Any investment scheme with a performance chart that is essentially a diagonal line trending upwards with little or no meaningful variation over many months is a Ponzi scheme and, as such, doomed to failure.”
Of course, Green Home encourages people to enroll other people into the scheme. Green Home pays rewards to people who enroll their friends: US$10 for five friends; US$20 for 10 friends; and US$50 for 20 friends.
In response to a question from TikTok user “Jordy vc” about whether this is a pyramid scheme, Green Home replied, “You are watching, but you do not want to see.” That was apparently good enough for Jordy. “I’ll take the risk,” he replied.
Others are less easily convinced. Personally, I’d say it looks a bit more like a Ponzi scheme.
On its website, Green Home has an official notice about a General Shareholders’ Meeting, held in Hong Kong on 19 September 2025. Here’s the photograph that the company used to illustrate the notice — obviously, then, this must be a genuine company:
