How Fraudsters Fatally Sold $20 Golf Ball Finders As $800,000 "Bomb Detectors" All Over The World
(Info from both this August 5th Foreign Affairs article and this 2014 BBC piece. h/t Sam Alaska for shooting it my way.)
Last month, 306 Iraqis were killed in a car bomb explosion that destroyed 2 Baghdad shopping malls. It is the deadliest explosion in Baghdad’s history. The terrorists’ car came from the northeastern provence of Diyala, meaning it would have had to have passed dozens of checkpoints. The car was carrying 550 pounds of explosives. The checkpoints are obviously designed to search for, among other things, explosives.
550 pounds of explosives is MASSIVE and should have easily been detected. They weren’t. Why? Well there are a number of reasons, but one of the most interesting — and the focal point of this story — can be chalked up to cheap golf ball finders called Gophers.
Yes, golf ball finders.
The Gopher golf ball finder was the centerpiece of a massive fraudulent business for decades. Over 20 years ago, an American car salesman changed the label from the Gopher, to the drug and explosive detecting “Quadro Tracker.” After the FBI declared that a fraud in 1996, however, it was brought over to the UK. It had a short lifespan there after some scientist tested it and said it sucked, but the fraudsters kept at it.
They repackaged and remarketed the Gopher SEVERAL times, eventually convincing Iraq, Niger, Mexico, Thailand, Egypt, and other countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia that it indeed was a highly sophisticated detector for explosives, drugs and more. Its popularity and price skyrocketed. The $20 Gopher retailed, for example, at around $8,000 to Iraq; the Iraqis spent about $85 million on the plastic heap of garbage. It took on different names in different places: The ADE-651, The GT200 and The Alpha 6. Those handling it were told not to take it apart and examine it, for such action could ruin the “sensitive technology.”
In Iraq, some of the ADE-651 devices sold for as much as $40,000. The GT200? Highest sale point of $25,000. But The Alpha 6? The highest sale point of the Alpha 6 was a staggering $803,000.
(Alpha 6 is a fantastic name. If Nike Golf had named their driver The Alpha 6 I prolly woulda paid thru the roof for that too.)
The fraudsters pulled this off by rigging demos:
Sales demonstrations would be rigged to succeed, she says. Anyone sceptical of the devices would be publicly humiliated. And users were instructed not to open the equipment – to avoid damaging the “sensitive technology” inside.
And by getting trusted entities to sign off on its validity. The GT200, for example, was backed by British embassies in Mexico City:
“The involvement of UK government agencies in promoting this is very embarrassing and awkward,” says Mr Sheldon, who was shocked to learn of the involvement of the Royal Engineers Exports Support Team.
I’ll admit, when I first read this headline I laughed. A bunch of idiots paying millions for a bunch of twenty dollar golf ball finders? Hilarious. The type of internet shit I live for. But as I delved deeper, I realized how awful this really is. How big of scumbags these guys really were. How many hundreds of lives their fraudulent operations undoubtedly cost.
Yes, several countries still “use” these devices. They’re at checkpoints in Iraq. In fact, some there still don’t acknowledge that these things are complete garbage (from 2014):
Gen Saad Ma’an, from Iraq’s Ministry of Interior, accepts the devices are not working “to the required level” but says the country is still waiting to replace them.
“Maybe it’s affected by conditions – by the weather, by how the policemen themselves are using it,” he says.
And they’re not only in Iraq:
They were also deployed at a recent security conference in Djibouti and, [in October 2014], the BBC filmed them in use at a shopping mall in Pakistan.
Absolutely absurd that people were able to pull this off. I get how it could start out — there are shysters everywhere always trying to make a quick buck. But at some point, on some level, how the fuck do you not realize how awful it is what you’re doing? James McCormick, Gary Bolton, and Samuel Tree are all convicted fraudsters that will now spend time in jail. Tree’s wife will do just 300 hours of community service.
Anyone that’s ever studied marketing (or maybe seen a Netflix documentary on marketing) knows that if you market something right, you can sell a massive amount of anything to basically everyone. The pet rock is perhaps the greatest example.
Usually it’s fun and games. Bells and whistles. Sadly, in this case, it’s life and death. In just 2008 & 2009, for example, over 1,000 Iraqis were killed by explosives. Thousands more were injured. And just last month over 300 more were killed in Baghdad. There is zero doubt that this fraudulent scheme contributed to those human casualties. And for that, FUCK James McCormick, Gary Bolton, and the Trees.
McCormick
Bolton
The Trees (Samuel + Joan)
