What we would tell you not to buy

Five products are being marketed in 2026 on benefits that no longer exist, or never did. Each claim below is checkable against a primary instrument, and each is still in live circulation. We have named the instrument in every case, because the point of this note is not that we say so.

1. Vanuatu, sold on Schengen access

The claim: a Vanuatu passport, in one to four months for about USD 130,000, gives visa-free access to the Schengen Area.

The instrument: it does not, and it will not again. The EU did not suspend Vanuatu's visa waiver temporarily. It moved Vanuatu from Annex II to Annex I of Regulation (EU) 2018/1806 by Regulation (EU) 2025/11, making the visa requirement permanent with effect from 3 February 2025, and it did so explicitly because of the citizenship programme. The sequence: partial suspension on 3 March 2022, full suspension in November 2022, and the Council ending the exemption permanently on 12 December 2024.

Vanuatu is the first country ever to have an EU visa waiver fully and permanently revoked over a citizenship-by-investment scheme.

The United Kingdom removed visa-free access in July 2023, also expressly citing the CBI scheme. Ireland has gone as well. The three destinations that made this passport worth buying are all closed. It now carries 87 visa-free destinations on the Henley index of June 2026, ranked 57th, and the trend has been one-directional.

Anyone still selling Vanuatu on Schengen access in 2026 is either three years out of date or lying to you. There is no third explanation.

What Vanuatu genuinely is: a lawful, fast, cheap second travel document attached to a zero-tax system, for someone with a weak primary passport who needs mobility that does not run through Europe. Buy it for what it is today, and assume further erosion. The OECD flagged the programme in 2018 as potentially high-risk to CRS integrity; banks and exchanges apply enhanced due diligence to it, and account opening on this document alone is often refused. It does not solve banking, and it changes nothing about the tax residency of someone still living elsewhere.

2. Nauru, sold as the new Caribbean

The claim: the newest programme in the world, priced below every Caribbean competitor, framed as climate adaptation.

The instrument: it is eleven months old and one major partner down. On 9 December 2025 the United Kingdom imposed visit visa and Direct Airside Transit Visa requirements on Nauru nationals and removed ETA eligibility. The Migration Minister described citizenship-by-investment as "inherently high-risk" and as granting "a new identity with minimal ties to the issuing jurisdiction" — the same reasoning, from the same playbook, that ended Vanuatu's EU access.

There is no Schengen access, and there never was. Nauru sits in Annex I of the EU visa regulation. Material claiming European mobility for this passport is simply wrong.

There is a second signal, and it is not a clerical one. The government cannot state its own price consistently. The official contribution page shows USD 90,000 for the principal applicant with a USD 25,000 discount stated to run to 31 December 2026; the official news page states the discount applies only to applications filed before 30 June 2026, a date now past. The undiscounted figure is therefore USD 115,000. Henley separately quotes USD 120,000 standard and USD 95,000 promotional. The launch price reported in March 2025 was USD 105,000.

A programme whose own two official pages contradict each other on price, under rolling discount deadlines, is telling you something about its administration. Discount-window urgency is a sales tactic. Treat the deadlines sceptically and the price as unstable.

3. Digital residency, sold as residency

Palau's Digital Residency ID costs USD 248 for one year, USD 1,039 for five and USD 2,039 for ten, payable by card or certain cryptocurrencies, issued remotely within days with no in-person appearance.

It is not residency. It does not confer the right to live in Palau, to work in Palau, to be tax resident in Palau, or to enter Palau on any basis other than as an ordinary tourist. The only real entry benefit is that holders may extend a tourist visa by up to two consecutive 90-day periods per entry — a tourist concession, not a residence right. Palau has no citizenship-by-investment programme; any offer of a Palauan passport for money is fraudulent.

The dangerous use is not the USD 2,039. It is the second-order one: presenting this ID to a home revenue authority as evidence of a residency change invites a fraud finding, not a tax saving. Palau's territorial treatment requires actual Palauan tax residency, which this cannot produce. The operator asserts wide crypto-exchange acceptance; some exchanges have publicly denied accepting it.

Estonia's e-Residency is the more respectable member of this category, and it is misused the same way. It is a digital identity for administering an Estonian company online. It is not residency, it does not permit you to live in Estonia, and it does not make you Estonian tax resident. Estonia's own e-Residency programme publishes a comparison against Palau's scheme, which is the clearest available statement that both are identity products rather than immigration status. We flag it because intermediaries resell it as a relocation or tax solution, and it is neither.

In both cases the name is the product, and the name is the misleading part.

4. Luxembourg's 1900 ancestry route, which expired six months ago

The claim: recover Luxembourgish nationality, and an EU passport, through an ancestor who held it on 1 January 1900. No residence, no language test.

The instrument: the route is extinct. It had two deadlines and both have passed. New applicants had to request the ancestry certificate from the Ministry of Justice by 31 December 2018. Those who met that deadline then had until 31 December 2025 to sign the recovery declaration before a civil registrar. As at July 2026 there is nothing left to apply for.

The two-stage structure catches people even now: holders of a valid pre-2019 certificate who did not sign the declaration by 31 December 2025 lost the right as well.

For over a decade this was the most generous ancestry route in the EU, reaching back five or six generations. Its final deadline passed recently enough that a great deal of live marketing material is now simply wrong. If an agency offers it to you in 2026, that is information about the agency.

What remains: the option procedure for adult descendants of a Luxembourgish parent, adoptive parent or grandparent — a narrower link — or ordinary naturalisation after five years' residence with the Sproochentest. Not French, not German. Luxembourgish, a language with roughly 400,000 speakers and no realistic self-study path. That test is the binding constraint and it is routinely underestimated.

5. The E-2 visa, sold with a Grenadian or Turkish passport

This is the most consequential item on the list, because the sums are larger and the misrepresentation is more precise.

The claim: Grenada and Türkiye are the two citizenship-by-investment countries with US E-2 treaties. Buy the passport, get the E-2, move to America.

The instrument: Section 5502 of Public Law 117-263 — the FY2023 NDAA, signed 23 December 2022, effective 27 December 2022 — amended INA §101(a)(15)(E) so that a person who acquired treaty-country nationality through financial investment cannot obtain an E-1 or E-2 visa until they have been domiciled in that country for a continuous period of not less than three years.

Buying Grenadian citizenship does not give you an E-2. It gives you the right to move to Grenada, live there for three years, and then apply. Domicile is stricter than residence: it means making the country your true, permanent home.

The exceptions matter, and they are narrow:

• Anyone who acquired the citizenship before 27 December 2022 is not caught.
• Anyone previously granted E-visa status is exempt.
• Nationality acquired other than by investment — birth, descent, marriage, ordinary naturalisation — is not caught at all.

That last exception is the interesting one. A family that takes Türkiye's property-based residence permit at USD 200,000, actually lives there, and naturalises by residence after five years is not caught by the rule at all, because their citizenship came from residence rather than investment. Half the capital, and the restriction does not apply. The trade is that Turkish naturalisation by residence permits only 180 days of total absence across the five years — about 36 days a year — which most internationally mobile families will breach without noticing.

Then, separately: the E-2 is not a green card. It is a nonimmigrant visa requiring nonimmigrant intent. It is renewable indefinitely but confers no permanent residence, accrues nothing toward US citizenship, requires a substantial, at-risk, non-marginal investment in a real operating business, and evaporates if the business fails. Dependent children lose derivative status at 21. For Turkish nationals the reciprocity schedule caps validity at 60 months with a two-year I-94 admission per entry. Families wanting US permanence need EB-5, not E-2.

Also still on sale, also gone

Three more, briefly, because all three are still quoted:

• Malta citizenship by investment (MEIN). Struck down by the CJEU Grand Chamber in Case C-181/23 on 29 April 2025; repealed by Act XXI of 2025 on 24 July 2025. It was the last direct CBI programme in the European Union. Any 2026 offer of a "last window" is a red flag about the adviser.
• Cypriot citizenship by investment. Closed since 1 November 2020. Any 2026 offer is fraudulent.
• A "lifetime UAE Golden Visa" for AED 100,000. The ICP publicly denied it in July 2025, said the claims had no legal basis and no coordination with UAE authorities, and threatened legal action against promoters. If an agent quotes it, that is the fraud, not the product.

The pattern

Four of the five items above were true once. Vanuatu had Schengen. Luxembourg had the 1900 route. Grenada was a same-year E-2 play until 27 December 2022. The industry does not generally invent benefits. It keeps selling them after they end, because the marketing is expensive to rewrite and nobody is checking.

So check. Every claim in this note has an instrument behind it: a regulation number, a public law, a gazette date, a judgment. Ask for the instrument. An adviser who cannot produce one for the benefit they are selling you is not withholding it.