It never fails
to amaze me how gullible people can sometimes be. It is a shame I don’t have
more cheek than I do, because it seems that the snake oil salesmen are having a
great time these days.
For every wacko
idea you can think of there seems to be somebody marketing it and selling it
and for some reason they never seem to run out of suckers to buy it. Some of
the schemes are downright evil and some very trusting albeit naive people get
sucked in and spat out and they are often pretty knocked about by the
experience. For the peddlers of such goods and services horsewhipping is too
good.
However every
once in a while somebody comes along with a really wacky idea that is taken up
by people who should know better and I for one can’t help but chuckle at both
the audacity of the vendor and the stupidity of the buyer.
One such scheme
was dreamed up by a bloke called Gary Bolton. Now before I go any further I
should make it clear that I think horsewhipping is also too good for Bolton
because his little scheme had some catastrophic downstream effects. However he
is far from the only culpable party here. Bolton’s outrageous plan could have
been scuppered long before any harm was done if certain bodies including the
U.K. Government and various police and military forces had done their jobs
properly.
Bolton is the
bloke who came up with the idea of selling bomb detectors and made over three
million quid selling them to police and military clients in Mexico, Thailand,
Pakistan, China, India, the Philippines, Singapore, Egypt and Tunisia. Good
idea, you might think until you learn that these devices were completely bogus.
Based upon a
golf ball finder the device consisted of a box with a handle and antennae
attached and some pieces of plastic inside it. It was first launched in 1999
and tested by the Royal Engineers whose opinion was that was only accurate
about 30 percent of the time, which of course means that the other 70 percent
of the time you were likely to get blown up. In other words probably no better
than guesswork at detecting bombs.
It would seem Mr
Bolt-On took this assessment with a pinch of salt and a lot more twink and as a
result his publicity material for his marvellous machine explained that the
device worked by locking onto the atomic structure of the suspicious parcel or
substance and then giving its exact location. He claimed it worked on static
electricity, which would seem to me to be a rather dangerous thing to have
around explosive devices (think cellphone and petrol station). Under the
circumstances Bolt-On seems an appropriate name for this modern day mad
inventor.
Our backyard
amateur engineer also claimed his device had a range of 766 yards at ground
level and 2.5 miles in the air and could penetrate lead lined and metal walls,
water and earth, but not apparently the brains of certain armies, police and
trade missions. Okay, I made those last couple up.
The British
judiciary has just jailed Bolt-On for seven years for his fraud and it was
claimed at his trial that people had lost their lives as a result of relying
upon his machines, which if true is definitely not funny.
But what I can’t
get over is why it took the law enforcement agencies over a decade to catch up
with this bloke considering he was marketing these machines to law enforcement
agencies and the military. I am also gobsmacked that the U.K. Government
offered support to his enterprise and Whitehall’s sales and export division
even introduced clients to him and allowed him to use their premises for
demonstrations. One can only assume that he used a genuine bomb detector for
these demos otherwise it is hard to see how anyone – even the police or
military could be fooled. And they wonder why military intelligence is one of
the best examples of an oxymoron you can find.
Let us not
forget that this bloke’s clients were people who were ‘in the business’ so to
speak. So how come they were so comprehensively hoodwinked and shouldn’t they
all be appearing before the beak charged with criminal negligence for buying
the bloody things and putting them into service? At the very least heads should
roll (or be blown off) in every agency that bought them.
Mr Bolt-On was
not working alone; he had a partner-in-crime called Jim McCormick who was
obviously a better salesman than him and who was jailed in May this year for
selling 50 million quid’s worth of the contraptions, mainly to Iraq. Expect a
fatwa on that dude when he emerges from jail.
But the real
punch line comes at the end as it does with every good story. Our enterprising duo
was nothing if not cheeky; they were selling their devices for £15,000 each yet
they only cost £1.82 each to make.
Is this the ultimate in cynical disregard
for human life or what?
No comments:
Post a Comment