Seller of Scam Bomb Detector Sentenced in UK

A UK court has sentenced the chief salesman of the most notorious scam bomb detector in history to seven years imprisonment. Gary Bolton joins his partner in crime, James McCormick, who was sentenced in May to ten years, and their chief customer collaborator in Iraq, Major-General Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives, who reportedly was arrested on corruption charges in February 2011.

Click on the embedded video above for an excellent background story on the scarcely believable fraud that was the GT200 bomb detector.

Here's the story from today's UK Guardian, Kent businessman jailed for seven years over fake bomb detectors:

A Kent businessman who made up to £3m a year from the sale of fake bomb detectors around the world has been jailed for seven years by a judge at the Old Bailey.

Gary Bolton, 47, hawked the bogus kit to military and police clients in countries including Mexico, Thailand, Pakistan, China, India, the Philippines, Singapore, Egypt and Tunisia despite it being based on a novelty golf ball finder.

The devices cost as little as £1.82 to make and were sold for as much as £15,000 [about $24,000]. They remain in use in Thailand, where human rights campaigners claim they have cost lives, and were only abandoned by Mexican agencies in 2011.

An embarrassing aspect of this sad business is that some UK government trade promotion entities - unwitting to the fraudulent nature of the devices - helped Bolton peddle his products abroad.

The court heard that branches of the UK government had offered some support to Bolton's enterprise, called Global Technical. They include UKTI, Whitehall's export sales arm, and the British embassy in Mexico, which from 2005 to 2009 offered support though introductions to potential clients and allowed Bolton's firm to use its premises for demonstrations.

Why would anyone buy a bomb detector that consisted of an empty plastic box and a telescoping antenna? Corruption is one answer, obviously. In a 2011 Report to Congress (here), the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction estimated that 75 percent of the value of McCormick and Bolton's considerable sales in Iraq had gone to bribes.

As for those reasonably honest police and military officials around the world who were genuinely taken in by the GT-200? Well, google "the ideomotor effect" for starters. But also reflect on the fact of life that fifty percent of everybody in any population group is below average. It might not have taken as much snake oil as you would expect to sell a guy an empty plastic box for $24,000. 

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Seller of Scam Bomb Detectors Convicted, At Long Last

Police Officer in Islamabad, Pakistan, detecting ... nothing

There is good news from the UK today, where a jury has convicted the biggest con man in the security industry on three counts of fraud. Jim McCormick, salesman extraordinaire of scam bomb detectors, will be sentenced in May. Then, police say, they will go after his multiple millions of ill-gotten gains.

I've blogged about this outrageous scam before, here, here, here, and here. The ADE 651 'bomb detector' consists of an empty plastic box, a swiveling antenna, 'coded' cards, and a massive load of snake oil. A little official corruption helps to close the deal, too.

The ADE 651, sold to Iraq for $65,000 @

The things have been sold under various names in Iraq, Pakistan, Jordon, Mexico, and many other places where the bombs are as real as McCormick's detectors are phony.

Would you buy a magic wand from this man?

The UK Guardian has a good piece on the 'magic' bomb detector that endangered lives all over the world:

Jim McCormick's claims about his range of detection devices were extraordinary. He said the Advanced Detecting Equipment (ADE) he developed at his Somerset farm could pick up the most minuscule traces of explosives, drugs, ivory and even money. They were so good they could spot target substances from as far away as 1,000 metres, deep underground and even through lead-lined rooms. If their plastic grips and waggling antennae bore a passing resemblance to a £15 novelty golf ball finder, that was no coincidence. The 57-year-old businessman had used the jokey product sourced from the US as a starting point for an enterprise that made him a multimillion-pound fortune but placed lives at risk around the world.

-- snip --

It was all nonsense, albeit potentially lethal for the people of Iraq, where 6,000 of the fraudulent gadgets formed a first line of defence against car bombs and suicide bombers at checkpoints. When the devices were opened, it emerged that cable sockets were unconnected and supposed data cards were linked to nothing. One scientist told the jury who on Tuesday convicted McCormick of three counts of fraud that the antenna intended to point to suspect substances was "no more a radio antenna than a nine-inch nail".

It is thought hundreds of lives could have been lost as a result of the failure of the devices, whose detection powers were no better than a random check. One truckload of rockets reportedly went through 23 checkpoints in Baghdad equipped with one of McCormick's devices without being spotted once.

-- snip --

It took the [British] government over a year to cotton on to the problems. In November 2008, a whistleblower wrote to Ian Pearson, a minister in the business department, urging him to shut down the trade in fake explosive detectors, but nothing was done. In January 2009, the whistleblower, who does not want to be named, sent a dossier detailing the scam that began with a hard-hitting title – "Dowsing rods endanger lives" – to James Arbuthnot, the chairman of the Commons defence select committee.

Arbuthnot promised to raise the matter with the minister for defence equipment and support but it was not until 12 months later that their export was banned on the basis that they were a danger to British and allied troops. By then, McCormick had made a fortune on the back of contracts with Iraqis, who paid $85m (£55m) for the bogus devices.

-- snip --

Police have identified £7m of McCormick's assets, which they intend to try to seize, but believe the fraudster has stashed at least that amount away from the eyes of the taxman and other authorities in Cyprus, Belize and Beirut ... McCormick had separate trading arrangements with other countries. In Lebanon, a UN agency and a luxury hotel were among purchasers. Devices were sold to Muammar Gaddafi's Libyan regime, Iran, China, Syria, Jordan, Georgia and Mexico.

-- snip --

[After selling someone else's phony device for a few years in the 1990s, McCormick] decided to try to make his own detector. By now the 9/11 attacks had happened and there were fortunes to be made in security. McCormick found a novelty device called the Golfinder "tuned to elements found in golf balls". The marketing blurb urged: "Don't laugh. It works when used properly," but added: "It's also a great novelty item that you should have fun with."

He bought 300 for just under $20 each and replaced the labels with his own. The ADE 100 was born. McCormick modified his device between 2005 and 2009 and it morphed into the ADE 101 with an asking price of around $7,000. A similar but more solid device was called the ADE 650.

-- snip --

By 2009, British and US soldiers in Basra and Baghdad were expressing "real concern" about the devices after x-raying them and finding no working parts inside. One brigadier told the Old Bailey jury "he had never seen the device detect anything". They compared them to divining rods or ouija boards. Soldiers reported going through checkpoints when they knew they were covered in traces of explosives. At one checkpoint McCormick's detectors might pick something up – but they would then sail through the next one.

McCormick was arrested in the UK in January 2010 and as part of the investigation a full double-blind trial of the devices at Cambridge's Cavendish laboratory found the results were no better than random. The device was right three out of 25 times. One scientist said McCormick's description of radio technology was "an affront".

But still the device continued to be used in Baghdad, Mosul and Basra. "We know it doesn't work and that it has been banned, but we are continuing to use it," an Iraqi army lieutenant told an AFP correspondent in the weeks after McCormick's arrest. "It is bullshit. But still we are lying about it."

-- snip --

"I'm confident people have lost their lives because of this," said Detective Superintendent Nigel Rock, who led the Avon and Somerset police investigation. "There are young Iraqi officials standing on checkpoints hoping this device is going to tell them if there's a bomb in that car or wrapped around that person. I find it incredible and diabolical. He knew what he was doing."

In a just world, McCormick would be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in Iraq searching for bombs with his own ADE 651. But in this world, it looks like we will have to settle for taking away his cash, cars, boats, and homes.

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Iraqi Treasury Gets Refund on Magic Wands

The wands in question are those scam bomb detectors that I have gone on about before (here, here, and here). That's an actual promotional video for them, above. Check out all those explosions! It's even more dramatic than those Brinks/Broadview home security commercials that feature single women in their twenties who live alone in five-bedroom suburban houses and are under constant assault by stalkers.

Now, Lowering the Bar, a blog by lawyers who see the lighter side, has taken judicial notice of this matter:

On Wednesday, the Iraqi Interior Ministry reportedly said it had recovered the equivalent of $20 million that the government lost due to corruption. Unfortunately, that's only a fraction of the amount it lost to people who duped it into buying hundreds of magic wands.

Some refer to these as "ADE-651 bomb detectors," but those people are crooks, like Jim McCormick, the head of the British company that sold them. He was arrested last year for fraud (but is currently out on bail). What he sold the Iraqis, and many others, was - literally - a plastic handle with a TV antenna stuck onto it, which the company claimed could find explosives in the same way a dowsing rod finds water. I guess that's true in a sense, because dowsing rods also don't work. This, however, did not stop the Iraqis from spending $85 million to buy 1,500 ADE-651s.

McCormick was the director of ATSC Ltd, which marketed the ADE-651 as being able to detect "all known drug and explosive based substances." (Amazingly, the company's website is still up.) Supposedly, it could detect tiny quantities of explosives at distances of up to one kilometer (or three kilometers from the air). In a test conducted by the London Times, though, it failed to detect a paper bag containing fireworks from a distance of a few feet.

McCormick insisted that his detectors do work, although in the Times interview he could not explain why or even what principle is involved. (This is generally a bad sign.) According to the company's website, which amazingly is still up, the ADE-651 uses "long range electromagnetic attraction" to detect the "resonance frequency" of nitrogen atoms, which sounds scientific but is in fact complete bullshit. McCormick, though, said he and his company had been "dealing with doubters" for years, but thought that they had finally identified the issue causing the doubts. "One of the problems we have," he said, "is that the machine does look a little primitive." To address this problem, "[w]e are working on a new model that has flashing lights."
Yes, that's the problem. It needs some lights.

The ministry's inspector general issued a report last October confirming that the things are totally useless, and news agencies have taken the things apart to show they contain no electronics. But some minds will not be changed. "Whether it's magic or scientific," said Major General Jehad al-Jabiri, "what I care about is [that] it detects bombs." Fair enough, only it doesn't. Although ministry officials did take swift action by granting immunity to the guy who signed the contracts, they did not take the magic wands out of service, and according to this report people were still waving them around expecting to find bombs as recently as three weeks ago. (I imagine some of them find bombs, but not in the way they expect.)

A policeman quoted in the report said he wasn't surprised that the inspector general found the devices to be a sham. "We all knew they're a failure," he said. "They don't achieve anything. It's all a show for the public." But that can't be true - what kind of government would spend huge amounts of money on security technology that doesn't work and is just a show for the public?

Can we at least get some flashing lights on our body scanners? I mean, give us our money's worth.

I observed airport police in Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi, Pakistan using the ADE651 to 'screen' incoming vehicles during a visit last October. The snake oil that is used to sell those things is so powerful it is almost impossible to overcome.

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