James McCormick was charged with fraud
today and is in a heap of trouble. For what you may ask? Selling
$75,000,000 of bomb detectors at $40,000 each. Did I mention they
were fake? The ADE 651s, GT2000s, and Alpha 6, 3 models of the same
scam, where sold to various governments over the past decade. In fact
more than 6,000 were sold to the Iraqi Army and very well may be
responsible for casualties due to its lack of being an actual
bomb detector.
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^James McCormick a.k.a. A** Hole of the Week
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They were modeled from a $20 golf ball
finder and contained no working
electronics. The strange thing is that the sales pitch itself seems a
bit sketchy.
He went “claiming
they could detect bombs, drugs, currency and ivory, and track objects
up to 3,280 feet below ground. -NYTimes” People actually believed
it and countries
actually bought it, even after an early model of this same product,
the Mole Detector, was found to be a fraud by Sandia National Labs in
2002. They stated that “It worked as well as random selection.”
How was James McCormick able to do it? Money of course! By
bribing public officials not to look into it. Seventy-five percent of
the contract value went into the pockets of Iraqi officials. Such
bribery also occurred in both the Mexican and Indian governments.
The Sad Thing:
The FBI could have stopped him years
ago. He tried the same scam in the US with a device called the Quadro
Tracker. The FBI investigated him in 1995 and issued a statement that
countries should not use the Quadro Tracker because they didn't work.
Countries still used them and only after a retired FBI agent got
scammed, did the FBI stop its production. No charges were filed and
production moved to the UK under a different name, the Mole Detector.
Let me repeat that: the FBI filed no chargers for selling fake
bomb detectors.
Sources:
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