A New, Full-Bodied Fraud Comes in a Whisky Barrel

There are some 48,000 barrels of Scotch whisky quietly aging in Martin Armstrong’s warehouses in southwestern Scotland. Last year, 17 of them became a problem.Mr. Armstrong normally deals with companies that buy hundreds of barrels at a time from distilleries, then pay him to store them as they age. In July, he started getting desperate calls from people who had bought just one or two barrels from an investment…